Chinese words

Perhaps the greatest contribution that China and its language have made to the Western world is tea. The drink is first mentioned in English in 1655. It came into English via Malay from the Min dialect té, related to Mandarin chá, which also gives us the slang term for tea, char, used from the late 16th century. Not for all the tea in China is first found in US English in the early 20th century.

 Problems communicating between the British and Chinese led to the development of a simplified form of language. This became known as pidgin [E19th], from the supposed Chinese pronunciation of the word ‘business’. The term was later used for other trade languages. Words were exchanged between both languages, and some distorted forms of Chinese entered standard English, such as chin-chin [L18th] for ‘cheers!’, a mangled pronunciation of qing qing, a Chinese greeting. Another ‘doubled’ word is chop-chop [M19th], or ‘quickly’, a pidgin Chinese rendition of Chinese kuaì ‘quick, nimble’, also found in the first part of chopstick [L17th]. Chop suey [L19th] is unrelated, being from the Cantonese dialect tsaâp sui ‘mixed bits’. Ketchup [L17th] appears to come from a Chinese word for fish sauce which takes various forms in different dialects including kê-chiap and kôe-tsap, which explains the various English spellings. Ginseng [M17th] arrived via Latin and French from Hokkien Chinese jîn-sim and Mandarin rénshēn meaning ‘man-root’ from the leg-like forked root. Other foods that have become popular in the West include dim sum [M20] from words meaning ‘dot’ and ‘heart’; chow mein [L19th] from chăo miàn ‘stir-fried noodles’; kumquat [L17th] from kam kwat ‘little orange’; lychee [L16th] from its Chinese name lìzhī; and tofu [L19th] which came, via Japanese, from Chinese dòufu ‘fermented beans’.

 Gung-ho dates from the Second World War. It is from Chinese gōnghé ‘to work together’ and was adopted as a slogan by the US Marines fighting in the Pacific under General Evans Carlson (1896–1947). He organized ‘kung-hoi’ meetings to discuss problems and explain orders to promote cooperation. More direct associations with fighting are found in kung fu [L19th] from gōngfu ‘merit + master’ and wuxia [M20th] from the Chinese words for ‘military’ and ‘knight errant’. More peaceful is the concept of ch’i or qi [M18th], literally ‘air, breath’, for the underlying life force, and of the balancing of the masculine and feminine and other forces in yin and yang [L17th].

 The term china for porcelain came from the fact that the distinctive translucent ceramic could, for centuries, only be obtained from China, until Europeans discovered the secret lay in the type of clay called kaolin [E18th], which gets its name from gaoling ‘high hill’, the name of a mountain in eastern China.

 See also soy, yen.