[
    {
        "id": 205214,
        "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-1966",
        "page_number": 170,
        "title": "RAS-1966",
        "content_text": "164\n\nNOTES AND QUERIES\n\nand transcribed in a variety of ways by native-speakers of Cantonese.\n\nThe origins of words such as amah are hidden in the obscure labyrinths of time but are still as fresh as a new-born babe. Such words contain the elements of English mammy, ma, French maman, Latin mater and so on, for they represent the infant mouth opening to bawl and sometimes the closing of the tiny lips over the mother's teat. Such words exist in all languages even as a rejecting, spitting series for the father: pater (in Latin), English daddy, Cantonese papa mimic the child's rejection of his father's milkless breasts.\n\nIt is unnecessary to derive Cantonese amah from an Arab source. Similar forms, demonstrably not of Semitic origin, occur in many languages; in those of the Iberian peninsula, ama may or may not be an Arabism. In India, it was one of the common Indo-Portuguese words for a children's nurse. It is this word which came to Canton either in the Portuguese lingua franca which preceded pidgin English as the jargon of the China coast or in pidgin English itself. The documents of the nineteenth century are rich in derivatives of this word and even today wash-amah and baby-amah are widely used expressions in Hong Kong. Chow-amah (wet-nurse) disappeared at the introduction of patent infant formulae.\n\nThe only problem is whether amah, which sounds as exotic in Cantonese as kowtowing once did in English, entered the dialect directly from a Portuguese dialect or was introduced by way of English. My understanding is that amah is seldom used by the Hong Kong Portuguese in the sense of servant and that the word, though Portuguese in origin, is an early English loan to Cantonese, the forerunner of pa-si (bus), mhodhang nreoezir (modern girl), bheazao (beer) and the hundred and one other loans found in the Cantonese spoken in Hong Kong today.\n\nUntil more evidence is forthcoming, the derivation of sz tsai and sz tau will seem far-fetched. Nor is there enough proof to convince that fa wong is a calque (translation) of Urdu malik, even though the semantic extensions of wong and malik appear to coincide. I cannot tell which are the foreign words from which we are supposed to derive kwuntim, sz-naai and tai pan and have yet to be convinced that Cantonese natuk is in fact the",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1966.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 213072,
        "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-1993",
        "page_number": 140,
        "title": "RAS-1993",
        "content_text": "121\n\nhe was a hero who helped pacify the San P'ing area of Changchou who then had settled in the area, and when the T'ang philosopher, Han Yu, was banished to Ch'aochou in AD 819 he and I-chung saw much of each other.\n\nHis legends are so similar to those told about Ch'ing-shui Tsu-shih that it is more than likely that they have been confused and adapted by devotees. His image portrays him as a seated Buddhist monk, holding a fan in his right hand, but without any unique identifying characteristics. His festival is generally celebrated on the double sixth. It is also celebrated on two other dates, lesser festivals, the 26th of the sixth, being the anniversary of his enlightenment, and the 26th of the tenth, the anniversary of him being borne off to Heaven.\n\nThree temples in Taiwan are dedicated to him, two in Taman and one in Nantou, though his image also appears on a number of secondary altars elsewhere in Taiwan. In a large temple in central Taman his image is the centre one of a triad flanked by Ch'ing-shui Tsu-shih on his right hand, and San Tai Tsu-shih on his left. They are said to have been sworn blood brothers.\n\nHis image has not been seen in Hong Kong or Macau, and has only been noted on one altar in SE Asia, in Singapore where he is said to have been an incarnation of Ti-ts'ang Wang. They claimed that he died in Amoy where he sank into the ground and disappeared. He is portrayed on the Singapore altar as a standing gilded figure wearing a Buddhist mitre, and holding a rattle stick in his right hand and a bowl in his left.\n\nSan Tai Tsu-shih\n\nAnother separate southern Fukienese cult appears to be confused with Ch'ing-shui Tsu-shih. Three individual images have been noted on two altars, both in Yunlin county in central Taiwan, under the title of The Three Generations of Patron Saints or, as it was explained in one of the temples, that the three images represented one deity, The Third Generation Patron Saint, San Tai Tsu-shih. The main deity of the three is said to be the Second Buddha of the 31st kalpa. Some Taiwanese hagiographies claim that Ch'ing-shui Tsu-shih and San Tai Tsu-shih are one and the same deity, though one of the two temple keepers refuted this and explained that Ch'ing-shui Tsu-shih is the deputy to San Tai Tsu-shih.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1993.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833t302",
        "rank": 0
    }
]