Now that we have been so sadly deprived of the freedom of movement within the European Union which we used to enjoy, we are stopped at customs checkpoints as soon as we start to leave our small island.
When we reach the German border zone, it is not much of a linguistic problem for us to work out that the German word Zoll (customs) has the same origin as the English word toll. Having to pay a toll to go across a bridge or through some form of checkpoint represents the same kind of obligation as having to pay customs duty when you cross from one country to another with goods.
The German word Zoll corresponds rather obviously not only to English toll but also to various Scandinavian words for “customs”: Danish told, Norwegian toll, Swedish tull and Icelandic tollar. Finnish tulli also seems to have been borrowed directly from Swedish.
In Old English or Anglo-Saxon, the version of our language as it was spoken and written before 1066, the word toll was already well established. Related forms were also found in all the Germanic languages which are the closest linguistic cousins of our language: Old Frisian, Middle Low German, Low German, and Middle Dutch tol; Old High German and Middle High German zol; Old Norse tollr.
These words were all borrowed from the Latin of the late Roman Empire, which had the word toloneum, a term which the Romans had acquired from the Greek telonion “toll-house”. In Modern Greek the word for “customs duty” is teloneío.
But if we are heading not into Germany but into the French-speaking territory of France and southern Belgium, this linguistic familiarity disappears. The French word for customs is douane, which bears no obvious linguistic resemblance to any English word, something which is also true of Catalan and Romansh duana and of Italian dogana.
There is, however, one English word which these Romance-language words are in fact related to, in a rather complicated and surprising kind of way – this is the word divan.
The most common meaning of divan in Modern English is “a low bed or couch with no back or ends”. I used to sleep on a bed of that sort when I was a child and my grandparents came to stay.
But the word divan came originally from Arabic diwan and had nothing to do with sofas. It had been borrowed from Persian devan “a bundle of written sheets, small book, collection of poems”. Goethe’s poetic anthology West-östlicher Divan, which had been inspired by his reading of the works of the Persian lyric poet Hafez (1325-1390), provided the inspiration for the name of Daniel Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra.
The word divan subsequently developed in meaning through “book of accounts” into “office of accounts” and then to “custom house”, which in the form of douane is what has survived into modern French. Divan subsequently came to mean “council chamber”, and then “a long, cushioned seat of the sort that was found along the walls in Middle Eastern council chambers”.
This “sofa/couch” sense of the word divan was taken into English in 1702, while the French “customs house” meaning first appeared rather earlier, in the 17th century.
WEST-EASTERN DIVAN
The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra was jointly founded in 1999 by the Jewish Argentinian conductor and virtuoso pianist Daniel Barenboim, who was born in Buenos Aires, and the Palestinian-American academic Edward Said, who was born into an Arabic Christian community in Jerusalem. The orchestra consists of young musicians from Hispanic, Egyptian, Iranian, Israeli, Jordanian, Lebanese, Palestinian, and Syrian backgrounds.
