#similarly
#(Nan)YangGang
Learning Chinese, there is a certain kind of word that drives me nuts. There’s some Chinese concept or thing. There’s a word in English for it, that one might naively assume was borrowed from Chinese. Except, no, it’s not, fuck you, it’s probably Malay. The actual Chinese word has nothing to do with that word. Two non-English words for the price of one.
Some examples:
- “Congee” is 粥 (“zhōu” in Mandarin, “zuk1”/“juk1”/“jook”[1] in Cantonese). “Congee” is via a Tamil word “kañci”[2], presumably due to the Portuguese or something.
- The traditional units of weight “catty” and “tael” are 斤 (jīn) and 两 (liǎng) respectively. “Catty” and “tael” are from the Malay “kati” and “tahil”. Again, trade in the east indies, so the words in English are randomly selected from Malay, Tamil, and southern Chinese languages.[3]
- A “gong” is a 锣 (luó). “Gong”[4] is Javanese.
- “Mandarin” in the sense of an official is 官 (guān)[5]. “Mandarin” is from Malay “menteri”, which indirectly derives from Sanskrit[6].
- “Cheongsam” is 旗袍 (qípáo). This one is really hilarious, because “cheongsam” is the Cantonese for 长衫 (chángshān in Mandarin), except that that’s a different kind of garment in China. But I guess in Shanghainese, a 旗袍 is called a 长衫, and then a bunch of Shanghainese tailors went to HK and now the English world knows the Cantonese pronunciation of a Shanghainese word for 旗袍 dresses. Whatever.
- “Joss” (as in “joss”, “joss stick”, or “joss paper”) is… nothing at all? Like there are Chinese words for the incense and for the paper you burn at funerals and for images of deities, but they don’t share any common components. “Joss” is bizarrely from fucking Portuguese(“deus”), filtered through… Javanese? Chinese pidgin English? Both? I guess it makes sense, since this is not a Chinese concept at all; it’s a grouping of stuff that only made sense to Europeans (i.e., weird idolatrous folk-religion shit).
