Do they just speak faster? Do the Indian words/pronunciation flow better/faster than English does? And they are simply trying to match the cadence?

  • merc
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    10 months ago

    It goes back even further than that.

    An 1865 dictionary of American English uses “boot” instead of “trunk” to refer to the… well trunks that were strapped to the front and back of a coach. (A coach being a specific kind of horse-drawn carriage, which takes its name from the village of Kocs in Hungary where they were popular.)

    https://archive.org/details/americandictiona00websuoft/page/152/mode/2up

    https://www.etymonline.com/word/coach

    In that 1865 dictionary, a Dickey (or Dicky) is defined as “A seat behind a carriage, for servants &c”, and a Rumble as “A boot with a seat above it for servants, behind a carriage.”

    https://archive.org/details/americandictiona00websuoft/page/1156/mode/2up

    So, originally in American English, the trunks strapped to the outside of a carriage were called “boots”, and the seats above them were “rumbles”, and maybe when there was no “boot”, just a seat for servants they were called “dickies”.

    In Indian English somehow the “seat on the outside of a carriage” became the “compartment in the back of a vehicle for storing things”. In British English they kept the name “boot” when it changed from an external box to a box that was part of the vehicle itself. And, in American English, they switched to calling it a “trunk”, most likely before it actually became part of the vehicle.