When I was learning French in school, I came across a word, peigne, French for comb. I must be 10 or 11 at the time. I vividly remember thinking that there was something that sounded so homely about that. I had always had this feeling while learning this language that I still don’t know how to articulate properly—the intonations of the language, the small talk, the jokes, they all had a cadence of familiarity to them. Peigne, however, was the word that piqued my interest. For a quick two days, that is; after fixating on it for two days, I went on with my life, not thinking about combs much (neither in a linguistic, nor in a utilitarian sense—I rarely ever combed my hair as a teenager, but that is a topic for another day).
That was until the summer of 2020. Everyone was sequestered in their homes and had nothing to do. I had just restarted practising French and that feeling of familiarity had again started to grapple me. It felt a lot like Odia (my native language) to me. On a hot June afternoon, it finally clicked – pania! That’s what we call a comb in Odia. So cool!
During this time I had also developed a newfound curiosity in etymologies, especially for words in the Indo-European language family. There are many words in North Indian and European languages that share a common origin word in an ancient language. So I thought that peigne-pania was one of such pairs between a European and an Indian language. To confirm my hypothesis, I went to Wiktionary, but found no evidence of it, there is just no record for pania on Wiktionary.
Okay, no problem, surely there must be some words in languages that are physically proximal to Odia that might resemble pania which are perhaps better recorded, so I could confirm from those records. Nope. Not that they’re not well recorded, but that they don’t resemble pania at all! The other Indian language that I speak fluently, Hindi, uses the word kanghi for comb (which is much closer to its English counterpart than it is to Odia). In Bengali, which is much closer to Odia than Hindi, the word is chiruni. Okay. Odia has a lot of influence from South Indian languages too, notably Telugu. Well, in Telugu it is duvvena.
Perhaps checking from the European side could help a little more since that is usually more well-recorded. That didn’t help me much except that I know now that pakshman, Sanskrit for eyelashes – pashmina, the name of the wildly popular wool fabric and the sheep from the Kashmir region – pectin, a type of starch, are words that are related to each other. So, pania could be the missing link here—maybe it indeed shares a common ancestor with peigne.
Another theory that I came up with after talking to a few linguists, which could be more likely, even though I am a bit reluctant to accept it, is that pania is a direct loanword from French or perhaps its variant in Portuguese to Odia. Indeed, there were a few small French ports in colonial Odisha. That would explain its uncanny resemblance to the Latin versions of the exact same word.
At this point, however, it is important to understand the linguistic behaviour of the Odia language—it is a very conservative language, it rarely takes loanwords from other languages. While almost all other languages of North India have words from Arabic or Persian, Odia rarely has any. So why would a conservative language flip the switch for one word from French? It's not as if combs were non-existent in Odisha before colonisation. On the contrary comb-making was a highly developed craft among many tribes. So, someone just decided to use the French version of the word in a fringe port town of Odisha which somehow made its way to the standardised version of the language? That seems far-fetched but not entirely unlikely.
This is something that has taken up space in my brain for a few years now. Unfortunately, I don’t have an answer. But hey, who cares anyway, it’s just a nerd hyper-fixating on a comb, something that I rarely use anyway.