In my previous articles on the last names Kartha and Kurupp, I wrote about their derivation from analogous titles in ancient Egypt. This article is about the last name Panicker, which was the title of military captains, soldiers, and martial art teachers in ancient Kerala.¹ Like the Kartha and Kurupp, it is also a derivation from an Egyptian title — heni, meaning “military commander.” Yet, heni is so different from panicker; how can this connection be?
In Malayalam’s long evolution from ancient Egyptian, it lost its native fricative sounds, including the sound [h], which rejoined its phonetic library after the introduction of Sanskrit. Thus, in modern Malayalam, words with [h] are usually of foreign origin, or derived from Sanskrit and even so, the [h] sound is frequently replaced with [k] or dropped.² Could original [h] have been replaced with any other sound as well? The answer is yes, it was replaced with [p]. This evolution is captured through another Dravidian language, Kannada. Many Kannada words starting with [h] have analogous Malayalam words starting with [p], and comparison with Egyptian shows that the Egyptian sound [h] was retained as such in Kannada. In other words, Kannada words deriving from ancient Egyptian retained the [h] sound, which in Malayalam, became [p]. Here are a few examples:³
Thus, it is not surprising that Egyptian heni became Malayalam pani. The addition of cker to pani to form panicker likely derived from Egyptian ker meaning “great,” or “senior” which was a common epithet added in Egyptian titles to denote respect.⁴ Thus, we get panicker, the “great military commander.”
With the change of military strategy from man-to-man combat to guns and missiles, the relevance of Kerala’s panicker narrowed to teaching in indigenous martial arts schools. Today, even that is on the wane, and the once prestigious title has become just another last name of a community.
Notes
[1] Achyuta Menon, 1911, The Cochin State Manual, 55 (Ernakulam: Cochin Government Press). panikkar was also used in relation to another community, the Kaniyan, who were astrologers. In this context, panikkar was also used interchangeably with panikkan, whereas the military title was not, suggesting that they may have different roots. The Kaniyan community is patrilineal and follows the makkathayam system of inheritance from father to son. Padmanabha Menon, 1924–37, A History of Kerala written in the form of Notes on Visscher’s Letters from Malabar, 4 vols., rev. ed. 2013, 3:448–55 (New Delhi: Asian Educational Services). Thus, they are likely not native Nayar and may have migrated long ago to Kerala separately from other Nayar communities. So, the Kaniyan panikkar may not have Egyptian roots.
[2] Hermann Gundert, 1872, A Malayalam and English Dictionary, 1076 (Mangalore: C. Stolz). The replacing of [h] with [k] occurred in ancient Egyptian too, with a certain type of [h], represented by the rope hieroglyph, being pronounced as, or merging with, the voiced pharyngeal fricative [k] in some words. Carsten Peust, 1999, Egyptian Phonology: An Introduction to the Phonology of a Dead Language, 103 (Gottingen: Peust und Gutschmidt).
[3] heli, https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de/lemma/97460; henu, https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de/lemma/106350; hetu, https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de/lemma/102060; hepei, https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de/lemma/855320. This transposition of [h] and [p] also worked in the reverse direction, with Malayalam [p] deriving from Egyptian becoming Kannada [h]. See, e.g., fekh, https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de/lemma/63970; bel, https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de/lemma/52860; peng, https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de/lemma/60150:
[4] ker, https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de/lemma/450158.
