[
    {
        "id": 213549,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1995",
        "page_number": 145,
        "title": "RAS-1995",
        "content_text": "114\n\nof it are hard to come by One of the best-known sources in English, whose descriptions I shall speak of later, is Charles G. Leland. In his book, \"Pidgin-English Sing-song\" published in 1876, Leland polishes off his introduction to the language with the words:\n\n\"There are, in all, not more than thirty altogether foreign or strange words in ordinary use, and a number of these are familiar to all persons of the least general information. What remains can present no difficulty to anyone who can understand negro minstrelsy or baby talk\"\n\nTo the modern person who has not lived in the Pacific Islands or Papua New Guinea, Pidgin English brings to mind partly apochryphal stories of Duke-of-Edinburgh worship and terms like \"mixmaster-bilong-Jesus\" (a helicopter) and \"big-man-box-you-bash-him-teeth-he-cry\" (a grand piano).\n\nWe have set the background to the article. Before we go further, let's just remind ourselves what China Coast Pidgin English spoken in the later part of the last century really did sound like. Listen carefully for the baby talk.\n\n\"O-lo dim Hongkong sai hab dou-mat-ji man tok-gi Ying-li-sı a-la sim mai. Je-sı naau no hap gat; a-la daat man go dai. Je-si naau mai ding-ki you no gen hi-ya wan pr-si Chee-na man tok-gi long daat o-lo dim man sim, fa-san.\n\n++\n\nHistorical background\n\nMacau was occupied by the Portuguese in 1557. They had previously been trading with south China for many years from a place called, in Portuguese, Lampacau\n\nDr Graciete Batalha, who has carried out extensive research on the Portuguese dialect of Macao (Glossario do Dialecto Macaense, Instituto Cultural de Macau. 1988 from original articles published from 1971-1977), has formed the opinion that during this early period of the development of the Macau \"patoa”, the formative influence was not so much the way that Chinese people learned to speak Portuguese, but the manner in which the Macau Portuguese formed the habit of speaking to the Chinese in the Portuguese language.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1995.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/95941j25g",
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    },
    {
        "id": 213550,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1995",
        "page_number": 146,
        "title": "RAS-1995",
        "content_text": "115\n\nIn the early seventeenth century, according to Dr Batalha, Portuguese had attained the status of a lingua-franca around the coasts of Africa and southern Asia, including Malacca. The resident population of Macau in 1563, according to Montalto de Jesus, comprised some 900 Portuguese, excluding children, with some thousands of Malays, Indians and Africans mostly domestic slaves. A creole dialect was already established among these groups, based on pre-renaissance Portuguese. This dialect was spoken by the Portuguese residents of Macau in addition to native \"metropolitan\" Portuguese.\n\nIn the period from 1550 to 1650, xenophobia among Chinese officialdom was very gradually overcome by a desire to import foreign goods and to exploit the market for Chinese silk, spices, porcelain and decorative articles. In the early days of Macau, Chinese who wished to work or carry on business there had to enter in the morning and leave the enclave through the border gate before sun-down. (Whether this requirement was laid down by the Chinese or the Portuguese is not clear.)\n\nDuring this period of Portuguese-Chinese trade, we speculate that the existence of an Indo-Portuguese creole spoken among a population, many of whom would have had long contact with Chinese settlers in south-east Asia, would have allowed ample opportunities for translation between Chinese and Portuguese traders. Demands on the Chinese traders to learn Portuguese would have been minimal.\n\nThe Honourable East India Company was founded in 1600, and the Dutch East India Company in 1602. In the 1650s, the first vessels of the United East India Company were coming to Canton to do trade. These fundamentally English-speaking traders were faced with a different order of problems.\n\nTheir exposure to the Far East at that time had not been long enough to permit the establishment of a lingua-franca. The low volume of trade between China and the North European traders up until the early eighteenth century was no doubt supported by translation services by Malays who had had exposure to the Chinese language.\n\nHowever, in the early seventeen hundreds, the demand for China trade rose dramatically, and this laid the ground for the development",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1995.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/95941j25g",
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    },
    {
        "id": 213566,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1995",
        "page_number": 162,
        "title": "RAS-1995",
        "content_text": "131\n\nThe Chinese have two words for chopsticks. The common one, found in Mandarin, the Wu dialects, Hakka and Cantonese, is kuaı-zi. The other word, appearing in Classical Chinese and the Min dialects, is Zhu.\n\nChinese etymological works relate that the classical term, zhu, rhymes with the word in the Wu dialects for \"becalmed\", and therefore superstitious sea-faring folk in that region adopted the word kuar to avoid a taboo word. If this seems far-fetched, it should be noted that such derivations of words in Chinese are commonplace.\n\nIt is therefore possible to establish that the concept of “speed\" and \"chop-stick\" are related in Chinese, but not because anyone ever found chopsticks quicker to eat with.\n\nWhile we do not wish to overturn the folk-etymology (indeed, we have no evidence for doing so), we should like to point out an alternative: seventeenth-century craftsmen used the word \"chops\" both for \"jaws\" and \"vice\" (like the ones you lick). See the OED for evidence on this.\n\nChopsticks were known to Western writers from c. 1540 (Portuguese), and the English word “chopsticks” appears in 1711 describing Chinese eating habits in an account of trade with India.\n\nChow\n\nThe word, meaning \"food\", is given in Tong Ting Shue as jaau-jaau. It may be related to the word “chow-chow\", meaning \"mixed”.\n\nDr Batalha defines a Macau Patoa word, chau-chau, as a Chinese fried food in a sauce, a mixture of different things, or a muddle. She gives as the origin the Cantonese word chaau, to stir-fry.\n\nIt seems clear that two different words existed, one of Indian origin, meaning \"mixed condiments\" or just “mixed”, and the other meaning \"food\".\n\nBut Tong Ting Shue uses jaau-jaau, employing the Chinese characters for “a cover\"; he was clearly not struck by any similarity.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1995.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/95941j25g",
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    },
    {
        "id": 213567,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1995",
        "page_number": 163,
        "title": "RAS-1995",
        "content_text": "132\n\nwith the Chinese word for \"to fry”. \n\nCumsha \n\nThis word denotes a payment, tip or alms \n\nA wealth of folklore has grown up around it. One stream has it that the word derives from the payment made to boat people to “come ashore\" from a ship at anchor. Another popular theory is that it derives from a Chinese dialectal word for “thank you”. \n\nDr Batalha describes a word in Patoa, cumesse (or camesso). She gives as the origin a Chinese term gam se, meaning a tip or present. Dr Batalha's explanation would be convincing if it could be shown that the Chinese word existed. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that it ever did: we suspect that the word is apocryphal. The existence of a word corresponding to the Cantonese gam je, (to feel grateful), but in another dialect with a pronunciation like cumsha is more plausible. Unfortunately, I cannot discover what that dialect is. \n\nTong does not list Cumsha at all, but Hunter mentions that the Chinese wrote the Pidgin word with the characters for “gold sand”, so that it would have been pronounced “gam-sa”. \n\nThe following information in Hunter is, we think, significant; \n\n\"Before she (any ship) could open hatches, the formality of “Cumisha and Measurement\" had to be gone through. The first word signifies \"present\", and was a payment made by the earliest foreign vessels for the privilege of entering the port;\" \n\nIf this information is reliable, it indicates that the word was applied from early times (i.e. to the vessels of the Portuguese traders), and was considered - notwithstanding Hunter's definition of \"cumsha\" - an official levy - not just squeeze or a gratuity, \n\nIf this is so, then we think that the correct origin should be the Portuguese word, comissāo, which means \"commission, agency, percentage, gratification, recompense, brokerage, factorage.\" This covers its application in Pidgin admirably.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1995.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/95941j25g",
        "rank": 0
    }
]