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What confuses me is that, though as I understand it Ketchup was a general term to decscribe a variety of sauces, in Cantonese it sounds exactly like Tomato ("Ke
by SeanLuke 3y ago
What confuses me is that, though as I understand it Ketchup was a general term to decscribe a variety of sauces, in Cantonese it sounds exactly like Tomato ("Ke") Paste ("tchup"). Given its origins in southeast Asia, I had assumed that could not possibly be a coincidence.
- pxeger1 3y agoWiktionary[1] says it’s “probably ultimately from Hokkien Chinese 膎汁 (kê-chiap, “fish sauce”)”. So not a million miles off? [1]: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/ketchup https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/ketchup
- SeanLuke 3y agochiap sure? Ke no. In Cantonese, fish is yu. But yeah. Also: I had thought it was originally Malay.
- arp242 3y agoMalay "ketjap" or "kecap" (different types of soy sauces) comes from Chinese "kê-chiap". It may be directly inspired by Malay languages without knowledge of Chinese and still be "ultimately from Hokkien Chinese".
- samatman 3y agoHokkien/Min and Cantonese are not mutually intelligible languages.
- SeanLuke 3y agoOf course. We were talking about the coincidence in Cantonese.
- resolutebat 3y ago膎 preserved fish, not 鱼 plain old fish.
- SeanLuke 3y agoAh! Well it still doesn't help (it's haai in Cantonese). But that's interesting.
- me_me_me 3y agoTomatoes are relatively late addition to european cuisine (1500ish), there would be influences from a silk for centuries before. It sounds quite probable.
- SeanLuke 3y agoThis comment sounds like you might mistakenly think tomatoes are Chinese.
- me_me_me 3y agoI meant the origin for the word ketchup might have came as word for some type of sauce from the silk road, or tale of it from merchants eating it while traveling the silk road
- huytersd 3y agoNot sure exactly what you’re saying but the Europeans brought tomatoes to India and East Asia.
- supertofu 3y agoA reminder that tomatoes are native to South America, and did not exist anywhere else until colonization of the Americas.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- okr 3y agoThank god for coloni, umm, borderless migration of people!
- aitchnyu 3y agoI can imagine some exec fine tuning the transliteration. Coca cola was first transliterated "bite the wax tadpole" or "female horse stuffed with wax". Coke then researched 40,000 Chinese characters and found a close phonetic equivalent, "ko-kou-ko-le," which can be loosely translated as "happiness in the mouth." Leaving this here since the site hijacked ctrl+c to add its url: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/business-jokes/coca-cola-in-chinese-is-ke-kou-ke-la/articleshow/623585.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/business-jokes/coca-col...
- yen223 3y agoIt's not branding, 茄汁 "kit chup" is literally how you'd say "sauce made from tomatoes" in Cantonese.