Complex etymology of the word "khash"

Anyone who has taken a linguistics class or has talked to a linguist knows the difficulty in distinguishing between causal links and randomness in tracing the origins of words. This process is difficult, in part, because comparative linguists attempt to discover the origin of a word without reference to outside facts, and instead try to construct theories of language evolution or sound shifts and then to verify these theories through empirical analysis of a sample of like-meaning but different-sounding words among theoretically related languages.

One example of randomness producing cognates would be the Persian and English word "bad". Although each has the exact same meaning -- ill-natured or corrupted -- these words have evolved through entirely separate processes from a common Indo-European source word. In other words, Persian-speakers, from their contact with Brits exploring for oil in the late 19th-century Iran, didn't borrow the English word "bad" from this contact because we know from historical texts of these languages that both English and Persian used the word "bad" long before either group had any contact with the other.

Linguists, by incorporating outside facts like this, increase the power of their linguistic theories, but linguists themselves often lack the cultural insights, historical knowledge, or generalist perspective across multiple languages and cultures to incorporate these outside facts into their theories. This is, yet, another sad result of the push by large research universities for their faculty to specialize in areas of science or humanities so that they are more likely to publish and to establish themselves as a "renown specialist" of such and such in a certain field. However, in so specializing, linguists often miss the insights of archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, economists, sociologists, speech pathologists, biophysicists, biologists, mathematicians, computer scientists, statisticians, and legal scholars. Of course, no one can know everything there is to know, so there is a balance that must be struck between being both a generalist and a specialist, and I don't claim to have discovered this correct balance.

One of the natural byproducts of the Cold War in US research universities was that Middle East Departments and Slavic Departments effectively divided non-Slavic peoples on the southern finge of the Soviet Union between Slavic/Eastern European and Middle Eastern/South Asian area studies. This was not exactly the most logical divide for area studies faculties given that the ethnic groups that inhabited the underbelly of the Soviet Union often were the same ethnic groups as or had much more in common with the ethnic groups of the Middle East and South Asia. Thus, a Turkologist at a US university often sat in a Middle Eastern Department and saw Turkic languages through the eyes of Turks in Turkey and its southern dialect of Turkic since that was the easiest region and group on which to gather information, nothwithstanding the fact that there were more Turks residing in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Soviet Union, and China collectively than in all of Turkey. Likewise, a person who studied Caucasian languages, that is, the languages of the Caucasus, was most likely a faculty member in a Slavic Department in the US whose first passion was Russian, notwithstanding the fact that Greek, Arabic, Turkic, and Persian languages were much more enduring and influential in the development of any of the Caucasian languages than Russian.

As a person who attempts to see the Caucasus and Central Asia through both a Slavic and Middle Eastern lense, it often grates on me when certain ethnic groups in these regions make nationalistic claims to certain foods, customs, or words -- in particular, words. What makes matters worse is that western foreigners in these regions often accept wholeheartedly their claims and will often reinforce these claims by bestowing credence upon them, without first looking across political borders for outside facts that would easily demolish these claims.

There was recently a discussion among a bunch of Georgians and non-Georgians about the word "khashi". "Khashi" in Georgian or "khash" in Armenian is a soup of boiled animal entrails enjoyed by both Georgians and Armenians. At first, the debate centered around whether the Armenians or the Georgians were the first to invent either the word or the dish. However, I pointed out that Central Asians also eat a food called "khash". Although Central Asians don't eat a soup of animal entrails, they do eat blood sausage and the steamed marrow and cartilage of cow and sheep bones, and they call this "khash".

It was originally suggested by those without knowledge of either Arabic or Persian that "khash" in Armenian forms the part of an adjective meaning "stingy" and in Mingrelian forms part of a verb meaning "to boil". I first erroneously suggested the word might be Persian thinking for a second that the verb for "boil" in Persian was "khashidan" as opposed to the standard "jushidan". After realizing this error, my next inclination was to search Arabic words as the most recent source of the Armenian and Georgian words. I searched Arabic words with "kh sh" consonant groupings, and I discovered the Arabic word "khushara" which consists of the consonant grouping "kh sh a r". What was the English meaning of "khushara" in Arabic without even knowing beforehand what this word meant? Animal entrails or offal.

Although my finding could be the result of chance, and I have no way of testing this without having a more general and testable theory of the mapping of Arabic words into Georgian, Armenian, Turkic, or Persian, there is one outside fact that should be added to this debate: Arabic and Persian are the two languages that produce the overwhelming majority of cognates between Central Asian and Caucasian languages simply because of the ability of the people who spoke these languages to dominate militarily and culturally those who did not speak their languages. And, given that Arabic and Persian adopted so few Caucasian words from the period of time that the speakers of these languages maintained satrapies in the Caucasus, one can almost rule out the possibility that the word "khash" originated in the Caucasus and spread by way of Persian and Arabic to Central Asia. Instead, the more likely scenario was that the word "khash" entered both Caucasian and Central Asian langauges roughly simultaneously as a result of the expansion of Umayyad Empire in the 7th and 8th centuries into the Caucasus and Central Asia.

That's not to say the food known as khash didn't predate the word "khash" in the Caucasus and that's not to say that "khushara" didn't come from another language such as Indo-European Hittite. However, my point is to show that probabilistically, a specialist linguist, without knowing something of the cultural and historical context in which a language is used, including the common characteristics of a number of languages that have interacted with the language of interest and the history of a region, will inevitably see causation where there is randomness or even invert cause and effect. I'm not saying that people need to know every language or be acquainted with every culture there is to know, but if Armenians, Georgians or American scholars are going to make certain claims about the origins or words, let alone the origins of foods or customs, the first rule of science is to describe all like phenomena and then to theorize what makes those phenomena alike, and that requires incorporation of not only formerly proved linguistic theories to guide the postulation of new theories but facts that lie outside the field of the specialist. It is only then that one can begin to determine theoretically and empirically whether a correlation is due to chance or not.

What concerns me is that, thanks largely to the Cold War, scholars in the US and people in the former Soviet Union, Middle East, and South Asia are missing glaring cultural and historical connections that prevent them from describing their present world and the causal links to how the world arrived in the present state in a truthful manner. I don't want to imply that they do so on purpose, but I'm inclined to believe from my own observations and interactions that this willful ignorance is usually more willful than ignorance.

Maybe modern-day Baghdad is a far cry from modern-day Tbilisi, but I imagine these two ancient capitals have more in common culturally and historically than modern-day Moscow and modern-day Tbilisi, so why is it that so few Arabophiles find their way to Tbilisi as opposed to so many Russophiles? I would suggest that it has something to do with the illogical divisions created by Russian and British colonialism, the creation of the Soviet Union, the Cold War, the Cold War redux that the world is currently experiencing, or a combination of all of these factors.

The West may have given the world the scientifc method, but it also gave the world the nation-state, and in some regards, the significance of the nation-state to the modern world and its implicit divisions since the Treaty of Westphalia have done more to undermine science than religion, economics, politics, or any other system for fostering and constraining human action and reaction. For better or worse, the nation-state will continue to define human relationships on a macro level for the timebeing, but we, as curious human beings and scientists, should always remain vigilant against the possibility that we seek the light of truth through the refracting prism of the nation-state.