American English terms derived from Cantonese

[xianhua]

Completely pointless I know, but I set myself the task of coming up with a situation which could revolve entirely (well, almost) around a conversation in Chinese Pidgin English:

The scene takes place outside a train station where the passenger, familiar with the taxi driver, opens the door of the taxi:

Passenger: Long time no see!

Taxi driver: Long time no see! Where-to?

Passenger: Crack Avenue

Taxi driver: No-way, that’s a no-go area

Passenger: Grrrh, no-this, no-that…

Taxi driver: Now look-see, I’ve been driving for….

Well, it passed some time on a Monday morning!

Now all we need is for the topic title to read ‘English terms derived from Chinese’ to help all those 'Googlers'.

[trien27]

功夫 Gong fu is pronounced gong fu in Mandarin too, so that is not going to help. It could be from either.

台风 is pronounced tai fung in Mandarin which sounds a lot closer to typhoon to me!

Today with Hanyu Pinyin being the most popular amongst those learning Mandarin, Cantonese was used when the Cantonese people came over to San Francisco or New York and brought along their dialect with them, when they said it, it sounded like "Kung fu" to American ears. Same with typhoon being "tai fung". In Pinyin, it's "tai feng", but in Wade-Giles used in Taiwan, it'd be the same romanization as in spoken Cantonese, but when actually spoken, there'd be a major difference.

Ching ching is used in British English but never in American English. Why? It was never borrowed or brought to the attention of the Americans. Ching ching = is reciprical term for politeness: a host invites the guest to some place and says "ch'ing /qing" meaning "Please go ahead". The guest reciprocates this gesture, by repeating what the host has done, so that's why the "ch'ing / qing" is repeated, but in English, the sound seems to be more correctly spelled as "ching" rather than the other two that's actually used, therefore appears "ching ching".

[trien27]

Check here: http://www.krysstal.com/display_borrowlang.php?lang=Cantonese

This site is TOTALLY wrong about the derivation of "catsup/ketchup". It's from Cantonese, not Fujianese or wherever. The words "gung ho" & "joss" aren't from Cantonese. Gung ho is from Mandarin, & joss is from Pidgin English spoken by Chinese people influenced by the Portuguese word for god, "deos".

Here's the website if you want English words derived from Mandarin.

http://www.krysstal.com/display_borrowlang.php?lang=Mandarin

Oops! This website I gave is totally messed up: Some of the English words which were derived from Cantonese ended up on the Mandarin page! kowtow, kungfu are from Cantonese, not Mandarin, and Tofu, is actually derived from Japanese usage of Chinese characters, not pronunciation, which isn't from Mandarin. sampan might also be from Japanified form of Chinese pronunciation.