Imports into English

[Guest AmrDiab]

I've just been thinking of the number of Chinese words that have crept into English. Apart from restaurant dishes, we have at least:

mien = mianzi 面子 "face"

typhoon = taifeng 台风 (via Cantonese)

tycoon = dakuan 大款 (again via Cantonese)

Japan = riben 日本 (via Cantonese "yat bun")

Can anyone think of any obvious others that I've missed out?

[Haizi]

Where did you get your information?

According to the American Heritage

[Guest AmrDiab]

Haizi: the usage of "mien" is far closer to the Chinese 面子 than it is to the French "mine". Your dictionary isn't necessarily right - I never trust dictionaries, particularly those of the Chinese language, but that's another story.

Of course kowtow comes from Mandarin. The phrase is 叩头, kou tou: "knock head". There's a whole other bunch of phrases involving kowtowing that start with 叩 kou.

Your dictionary says tycoon comes from Japanese, but it doesn't give the characters for the phrase. I guess it would be 大亨 da heng in that case. It's funny though that there's another phrase, da kuan, which sounds very similar in Cantonese. Could the Cantonese have been looking for suitable characters with which to phoneticise, while at the same time having as close a meaning as possible? If so that would also explain typhoon, but they could equally have given it to the Arabs during trade. To my mind, typhoons occur a lot more off Guangdong province than they do in the Middle East or Greece.

[TSkillet]

Depending on who you believe - tofu is either from the Japanese or Chinese - and then the arguement could go that the Japanese got it from the Chinese.

My favorite is ketchup - from the cantonese "kie-jup" - tomato sauce. Some places/dictionaries will list this as a Malay word- don't listen to them, they're wrong.

[Haizi]

Haizi: the usage of "mien" is far closer to the Chinese 面子 than it is to the French "mine". Your dictionary isn't necessarily right - I never trust dictionaries' date=' particularly those of the Chinese language, but that's another story.

[/quote']

For this matter, I trust dictionaries more than my or other people's intuition. Mien as in "He was a Vietnam veteran with a haunted mien? --James Traub)" can certainly not be translated as mian4zi5. Maybe, yang4zi5 is a more suitable translation.

[wix]

Depending on who you believe - tofu is either from the Japanese or Chinese - and then the arguement could go that the Japanese got it from the Chinese.

My favorite is ketchup - from the cantonese "kie-jup" - tomato sauce. Some places/dictionaries will list this as a Malay word- don't listen to them' date=' they're wrong.[/quote']

I think if you look at words for food you will discover quite a few imports from Chinese. The most obvious one is tea, which is derived from the Hokkien teh. The word for tea in almost every language has the Hokkien teh or Cantonese cha as its root. e.g. Hindi = chai, Thai = cha, Japanese = cha. Perhaps others can add to the list.

TSkillet, while I don't know the exact details regarding the word ketchup is it possible that it was imported into Malay from Cantonese and then from Malay into English? I am sure there are other examples of words that while they haven't been imported from Chinese directly they come from another language such as Malay or Japanese, but the original word came from Chinese.

[Guest Anonymous]

I think if you look at words for food you will discover quite a few imports from Chinese. The most obvious one is tea, which is derived from the Hokkien teh. The word for tea in almost every language has the Hokkien teh or Cantonese cha [/i']as its root. e.g. Hindi = chai, Thai = cha, Japanese = cha. Perhaps others can add to the list.

Why do you assume that those languages imported the word "cha" from Cantonese and not Mandarin or another Chinese dialect with the same or similiar pronounciation?

In Korean, tea is also "cha" and it's actually "ocha" in Japanese.

[roddy]

Why do you assume Wix is assuming? It might be more polite to ask for the source of the information, rather than imply someone is guessing incorrectly.

I wonder where more tea has been exported from - Cantonese-speaking areas, or Mandarin-speaking areas, or another-Chinese-dialect-with-the-same-or-similar-pronunciation speaking areas. . .

Roddy

[Guest Anonymous]

Why do you assume Wix is assuming? It might be more polite to ask for the source of the information, rather than imply someone is guessing incorrectly.

I assumed that Wix assumed because he didn't provide any proof or evidence that the source was indeed Cantonese rather than Mandarin or another Chinese dialect. I didn't mean to be rude but was simply asking a question.

I wonder where more tea has been exported from - Cantonese-speaking areas, or Mandarin-speaking areas, or another-Chinese-dialect-with-the-same-or-similar-pronunciation speaking areas. . .

While tea may be mostly grown in Southern China, where Cantonese is most likely spoken, but tea was exported almost everywhere within and outside of Chinese border. Is it truly that ridiculous to think that maybe not *ALL* the nations in the world imported their word for tea from Southern China? Maybe some nations were first intorduced to tea from Chinese speaking Mandarin or another dialect. Of course, this is just all spectulation. I have no evidence to prove it one way or the other. When I asked my question in the previous post, I was merely curious as to whether Wix had a reason to assume, or state, that all the nations in the world, or at least the ones he mentioned, imported their word for tea from Cantonese.

[PollyWaffle]

Hokkien teh or Cantonese cha as its root. e.g. Hindi = chai, Thai = cha, Japanese = cha. Perhaps others can add to the list.

in Irish slang tea is also called 'cha'

[wix]

This is a good link for showing the origins of the word for tea in different languages. http://tea.hypermart.net/cult/name.html

I also found this interesting link: OED words whose etymology is "Chinese"

[smithsgj]

Are mango and lychee from Chinese? Or is it the other way round?

[skylee]

I think lychee is from Chinese. The fruit is from southern china. There are lychee trees over 1000 years old in Hainan, Guangdong and Guangxi provinces. According to the information on the internet the name of the fruit can be found in records written in 200 BC.

Mango probably is not a Chinese term.

[ChouDoufu]

While tea may be mostly grown in Southern China' date=' where Cantonese is most likely spoken, but tea was exported almost everywhere within and outside of Chinese border. Is it truly that ridiculous to think that maybe not *ALL* the nations in the world imported their word for tea from Southern China? [/quote']

I don't think it's that tough to assume that most of the western words for tea comes from southern china. Afterall, during that time western countries were trading only with southern china. they weren't even allowed to go to northern china in most cases, so it makes sense to me that the word would come from a region where they were allowed to go and trade, southern china...

on a side note, i've noticed a couple different camps of thought on this site: 1) All these words come from Cantonese vs. All these words do not come from Cantonese; 2) Beijing is a good place to study vs. Beijing is not nice, go somewhere else to study.

[wix]

Just found this one. It is a pretty obscure word.

cumshaw

It means tip or gratuity and it comes from the Hokkien gum-sia (Mandarin: ganxie), meaning thank you.

[Guest shaning]

Haizi: the usage of "mien" is far closer to the Chinese 面子 than it is to the French "mine". Your dictionary isn't necessarily right - I never trust dictionaries' date=' particularly those of the Chinese language, but that's another story.

[/quote']

For this matter, I trust dictionaries more than my or other people's intuition. Mien as in "He was a Vietnam veteran with a haunted mien? --James Traub)" can certainly not be translated as mian4zi5. Maybe, yang4zi5 is a more suitable translation.

Well, in Polish, which is an Indo-European language like English or French, there is a word "mina" which means something like "apearance" or "pulled face". So I think this root is Pra-Indo-European not Chinese

[pazu]

In Korean, tea is also "cha" and it's actually "ocha" in Japanese.

In Japanese, the word "O" implied a respectful way to use a noun, so the Japanese must have imported the word "cha" first and peppered it with the respectful stem "o-".

Why do they have to respect a cup of tea, for sure I know not.

But they respect "o-hashi" (oh no, not hashish, just chopsticks), "o-yuu" (hot water), "o-kusuri" (respectful medicine!), "o-mise" (respectful shop), and so on. So, why not for CHA?

[cometrue]

Kung Fu

its from Cantonese, one saying was made by bruce lee.

[Eloise]

'Long time no see' directly translated from 好久不见了 (although its a phrase rather than a word).

[Guest Yang Guizi]

what about racial slurs? dictionaries never have the etymology of them

my opinion:

• chong - 中国 (zhongguo = china)
  
• gook - 한국 korean (hangwuk = korea)
  

any others?