Malayalam has a Dravidian core and a Sanskrit overlay that came down over the mountains. This class finds a third set of words entirely — and these did not come over the mountains. They came off boats. Remember the geography. Kerala has mountains on one side and the Arabian Sea on the other. For two thousand years the sea was not a barrier. The sea was the highway. And the reason ships came was one thing above all others. Pepper. കുരുമുളക് (kurumulaku) — black pepper. It grew in Kerala and, for most of history, almost nowhere else that mattered. The Romans came for it — there are Roman gold coin hoards in Kerala soil. The Arabs came for it and stayed. Then the Portuguese, the Dutch, the English. Each of them left words behind, and those words are still in ordinary daily Malayalam, used by people who have no idea they are speaking Portuguese. Once you can spot them, a Malayalam sentence becomes a map of who docked here and when. In this class: • The Portuguese words hiding in your kitchen and your church • Arabic and Syriac in the vocabulary of trade, faith and law • Dutch, Hebrew and Chinese — smaller layers, but genuinely there • English loans, old and new, and how Malayalam reshapes them Take Class 55 on the Sanskrit layer first if you have not. Quizzes below. Dr. Reshmi R Nair — SpeakMalayalam.