These are words you use without knowing it. At the table, when looking for an accompaniment for your fries, on the terrace of a cafe, when you exchange a drink or in your kitchen, if you are looking for a tea to fight fatigue. Terms originating in the Chinese language are intimately and beautifully part of the French language. Anthology.
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Tchin-tchin, "please"
Eh yes! Although the French are famous drinkers, it is not to Rabelais or even to Molière that we owe the expression. According to Le Trésor de la langue française, it comes from "tsing tsing" which means "hi" in Anglo-Chinese pidgin from the Canton region, China. Pidgin is the name given to the "linguistic system made up of modified English and native elements, serving as an additional language in the Far East".
But how would she have arrived in France? After the sinologist Jacques Pimpaneau who tells the story of the locution in his book Celebration of drunkenness (Éditions Philipe Picquier) and as journalist Ophélie Neiman notes in Le vin c'est pas sorcier (Marabout), "tchin-tchin" dates from the time of Napoleon III. Back in France, the soldiers who had campaigned in China under the emperor, explained that the Chinese drank by exchanging tchin-tchin. In this case, they did not really say "tchin-tchin" as it is pronounced in French, but "qing qing", or "I beg you".
Note that the formulation can very well be written "tchin-tchin" and "tchin tchin" without hyphen.
From fish brine to ketchup
Let's stay in a gastronomic register and study a little this condiment that we taste with all dishes (or almost). First of all, it should be noted that the original meaning of ketchup is not guaranteed. The use of the conditional is therefore to be taken into account. According to Le Dictionnaire historique de la langue française (Le Robert), the term is first attested in the forms "katchup" (in 1785, in Quebec), "catchup (in 1815, in Canadian French), Ket-Chop then "catsup" and even "calchup".
Does this mean that the word "ketchup" as we know it was born yesterday? No. It is already noted in its form, but in English, at the beginning of the 18th century. However, it appears under different spellings "catchup" (1690) and "kitchup", which would itself be borrowed from Chinese. Indeed, the word would come from "kôe chiap" or "kê tsiap", two formulations which designated "fish brine". Nothing to do with tomato paste. And even! The Chinese expression could come from the Malay "kêchap", meaning "taste".
Tea thanks to the Dutch
And the tea in there? Do not believe that the British have anything to do with it! Indeed, and as indicated by the Historical Dictionary of the French language, the word is "borrowed from the Malay teh, te or a word t'e of southern Chinese dialects by Dutch". All of this, specifies the thesaurus, "in texts in modern Latin". A hell of a way! Especially since the art of drinking tea is not new. Chinese botany and medicine trace its use back to the third millennium BC. It was then used to relieve fatigue, "fortify the will" and even "revive the view".
The first attestations of the word "cha", all rights derived from the current Chinese term "cha", in the West date back to the 9th century. But it was not until much later, at the dawn of the 17th century, that the plant ended up being imported into Europe. Also according to Le Dictionnaire, it is thanks to the Dutch East Company that tea was able to reach our cups.
Note that the transcription of the Chinese word in Portuguese (chá), Russian (Tchaï), Turkish (çay) is completely transparent.
Ginseng men
More transparent than the previous terms, "ginseng" is nonetheless interesting for its history. As can be read in Le Trésor de la langue française, the term attested in the 17th century comes from two Chinese words: jên (man) and shên (plant). Indeed, we consider that there is a resemblance between the root of the plant and the human body. It's up to the consumer to judge ...
In the same way the origin of the lychee is clear. But did you know that the word, borrowed from the Chinese "li-chi", was brought to us through Portuguese and Spanish travel accounts? This is what The Historical Dictionary of the French Language notes. It is then, in the 16th century, attested in the form "lechia". It was not until two centuries later, in 1721, that the "lychee" finally appeared.
A “haï-ku” and “western soys”
The “haï-ku”, a little poem that knows how to describe the evanescence of the world in a few words, might not come from Japanese. As we can read in The Historical Dictionary of the French Language, "haïkaï", "haï-kaï" or "haï-ku" is a Japanese word attested in 905, as the title of a section of an anthology, under the haikai-ka form. You can find this job in the title of the collection To live here, eleven haï-kaïs by Paul Eluard. That being said, "it is a term of Chinese origin meaning" poem implementing the games of the mind "".
The word soy may not have originated from Japanese either. According to Le Trésor de la langue française, the word would probably come from the Dutch soya, Japanese shoyu "soy sauce" and the latter to Chinese. In Cantonese, it is noted in the form tseung-yau and in mandarin chiang-yu, which literally means "soybean oil", chiang "soybean" and yu "oil". However, as noted in The Historical Dictionary of the French Language, "it is most probably Dutch which transmitted the word, through Japanese, to the West".
Note that if we use the formula “spaghetti western” to speak of westerns produced in Italy, we use the expression “western soy” to “designate an action and adventure film shot in the Far East and whose the characters are Asian ”.
