One of the effects of the early association: of the East India Com~ pany with British trading in China has been to introduce certain Indian or Anglo-Indian expressions into the current vocabulary of the foreigner here. Thus tiMn—although original derived. from the Scandinavian and= aelually used in Plantagenet days to describe a litre meal—w: s taken to India by the Elizabethan Merchant Venturers and, havi dropped out of use in England, came to be. regarded as an Indian' word, as indeed certain dictionaries sug: est itis, In China it is used to-day among English people far more than in India where it is mostly employed in conveying hindustan instructions to the bearer (house-boy) and by him announcing the readiness of lunch. Whereas invitations to "tiffin" are: common here and were current in the India of Jos Sediey, the term "luncheon" is now more fashionable among Europeans in India except, possibly, in. Madras, Bombay and Calcutta. "Another Indian word—of sangerit derivation—has been adopted by the foreigner in China to grapple with the mysteries of Chinese Relation for 100,000—a lakh. Curious.
enough, the complementary word for ten million or @ hundred lakhs—crore—has been rejected and more over the Indian system of writing these two numeral substantives figures is not used here, In to-day's lending article quotation from an Indian report correctly sets out the sum of Rupees eight lakhs thirteen thousand nine hundred and forty-nine Rs, 8,15949, Similarly eight crores would be" written 8,00,00,000. and of 80,000,000 in Indian terminology. The point Is made because, on more than one occasion, readers have expressed bewilderment when con: fronted by statistics from Indian sources,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.