亚氏

[randall_flagg]

Thanks to the forums I now know A LOT about 氏。

But I've been meaning to ask: What is the etymology of the 亚 in 亚洲。 Why would Asia be the second, or let alone the "inferior" continent?

[xiaocai]

I think it is solely a phonetic translation.

[Hofmann]

It's an abbreviation of a transliteration of "Asia."

[trien27]

Originally, "Asia" was translated as "亞細亞" which is the Chinese phonetic for "Asia" using Cantonese as the dialect. In Cantonese, it's "ah-sai-ah", which is very close to how you say "Asia" in Greek, the language where this word came from. Usually, when Cantonese is used as the dialect to translate names or words, it most likely is Cantonese used in Hong Kong, not Cantonese used in Mainland China. Later on, the name 亞細亞 is simplified to "亞洲", now simplified from Traditional Chinese to "亚洲" in Mainland China = "yàzhōu" using Mandarin, written with Pinyin. Asia is never translated as 亞氏 / 亚氏.

亚 is actually one of the variants for "亞". In Japan, they used a different Chinese variant for 亞, which is "亜". In the case of "Asia", 亞 doesn't use the meaning of "second", but rather just the phonetic "ah" / "ya", which is a modern meaning: 亞軍, means "second runner up" as in contests or pageants.

In Modern Chinese, sometimes when written 亜 or 亞 is substituted for "啊" when calling someone by a familiar name: 啊美 could be written unofficially as "亜美 or 亞美", where your friend's name is 美. Note: In Cantonese, 亞 & 啊 are both pronounced "ah", so they can used interchangeably, but not in Mandarin: In Mandarin, 啊 = "ah", while 亞 = "ya".

Edited January 22, 2009 at 03:00 AM by trien27
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