In Malayalam, the word modikkaaran മോടിക്കാരന് means “dandy.”¹ The word derives from modi മോടി “high bearing,” “majesty,” “grandeur.”²
It so happens that ancient Egyptian pharaohs were addressed by the salutation matikaru, which is translated as “justified” by Egyptologists.³ Egyptian matikaru is so very close to Malayalam modikkaaran that it is terribly tempting to associate them together. Indeed, Malayalam modi suggests that perhaps they were once the same word. It is likely that the Egyptian word in reference to the pharaoh must have been the equivalent of the English term “your majesty,” signifying the pharaoh’s grandeur. Over time, in Malayalam, it must have degraded to refer to a man having the pharaoh’s grand appearance, but not nearly his power. Thus, the dandy.
I’ve written previously about Egyptian mat meaning “truth.” One phrase in which it is used is wn-mat “to be truthful.”⁴ This corresponds directly to the Malayalam adjectival phrase maattulla മാറ്റുള്ള or verbal phrase maattundu മാറ്റുണ്ട്, both meaning “to be authentic.”⁵ Notice the final sounds [l] in -ulla -ഉള്ള and [n] in -undu -ഉണ്ട് in these words. They correspond to Egyptian wnn “to become.”⁶ In Egyptian, the hieroglyph for [n] could also be used for [l].⁷ Native speakers of those ancient times knew when to use which sound; it is only we, in the present, who are in the dark about it. Perhaps they used different sounds to distinguish between adjectival and adverbial forms of wn-mat “to be truthful,” as in Malayalam. Can we ever know? Alas! the winds of time have long silenced their tongues and all we have to fall back on is the vain dandy in place of the majestic king.
Notes
[1] An old nursery rhyme describing a vain rooster goes like this: മോടിക്കാരൻ മൈ മിനുക്കി വീമ്പുകാരനോ; കോപ്പരാട്ടി കാണിപ്പാനും എന്റെ തൊഴിലോ? “Is the dandy a fashionable boaster? is it my [his] job to also be a clown?” https://ml.wikisource.org/wiki/താൾ:CiXIV131-6_1879.pdf/140.
[2] https://dsal.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/app/gundert_query.py?qs=മോടി&searchhws=yes.
[3] https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de/lemma/400178.
[4] https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de/lemma/46200.
[5] https://dsal.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/app/gundert_query.py?qs=മാററല്&searchhws=yes. Notice the transposition of the prefix and the suffix between Egyptian and Malayalam.
[6] https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de/lemma/867452.
[7] The hieroglyph represented [l] only in old Egyptian (before 2000 BCE) whereas it represented [n] in both old and later Egyptian. James Allen, The Ancient Egyptian Language: An Historical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
