Re: OT: Junk
| From: | J Y S Czhang <czhang23@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, September 9, 2003, 17:31 |
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In a message dated 2003:09:09 09:34:51 AM, andjo@FREE.FR writes:
>I was recently told that "junk" is the general Chinese term for "ship".
:P~~~ *thPttt!*
>I thought this would be the best forum I've got access to to learn i) if
>that's true,
Nope, not true.
>ii) if so, do the Chinese have a special term for the ship-types
>we westerners call "junks"
Cantonese, Mandarin, or Hakka, etc. ??? There are many regionalects to
choose from... esp'ly along the coast and along the big river systems.
>and iii) from what kind of Chinese is the
>word "junk" derived - it does not look much Mandarinesque.
obsolete French _juncque_ from Portuguese _junco_, from Dutch _jonk_,
Javanese __djong_ (source: OED)
---
Hanuman Zhang, MangaLanger
Language[s] change[s]: vowels shift, phonologies crash-&-burn, grammars
leak, morpho-syntactics implode, lexico-semantics mutate, lexicons explode,
orthographies reform, typographies blip-&-beep, slang flashes, stylistics
warp... linguistic (R)evolutions mark each-&-every quantum leap...
"Some Languages Are Crushed to Powder but Rise Again as New Ones" -
title of a chapter on pidgins and creoles, John McWhorter,
_The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language_
= ! gw3rraa leg0set kaakaa!
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