RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1963 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/4m90m091v 148 NOTES AND QUERIES David Lopes, in his Expansão da lingua portuguesa nos séculos XVI, XVII e XVIII, showed that a pidginized Portuguese was the Europeans' lingua franca in the East up to the nineteenth century. This may have been the jargon from which the English sailors found their lingo and taught it to the low life of English sea ports. If this is so, it may have entered one level of our language at approximately the same time as savvy, probably Portuguese sabe, though the OED says Spanish, and Partridge (Origins) says Sabir; dodo, Portuguese doudo: OED, 1628 E. ALTHAM Lett. to Sir Edw. Altham "18 June in the Iland Mauritius, called by ye Portingalls a DoDo... P.S. Of Mr. Perce you shall receue a iarr of giner... and a bird called a DoDo, if it lives"; pickaninny Portuguese pequenino: OED 1657 R. LIGON Barbadoes, 48 "When the child is borne (which she calls her Pickaninnie) she (a neighbour) helps to make a little fire neve her feet... In a fortnight, this woman is at work with her Pickaninny at her back." But even if lingo did enter English cant from Sabir, it would be likely that it was later reinforced by a similar form in sailor's Portuguese. The same could be said, of course, of savvy. | ROBERT WALLACE THOMPSON, ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1966 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811 NOTES AND QUERIES 165 Malay title dato. As for Mo-lo-cha, an abusive expression for an Indian, I see the Portuguese element mouro, 'a Moor'. The slang term for Indian in Macanese is still moro- the area round Belilios Terrace in Hong Kong was once known as mato moros, 'hill of the Moors' because of the large number of Indians living in the district. This name was transformed by folk-etymology to the good old Christian matamoros ‘kill the Moors'. Santiago (or St. James) is nicknamed 'matamoros' in Spain to this day. Moreover the Indians in Malaysia are referred to by the Portuguese of Malacca as moros, whether they be Muslims or not. The Muslim Malays are never so named. In the Philippines the non-Christian inhabitants of Mindinao and other southern islands are also known as moros, a name given them by the Spaniards. The old pidgin records collected by Leland in the nineteenth century also give moloman as the pidgin English word for Indian, so that there is no more reason to derive mo-lo-cha from Maharajah than to imagine that Hong Kong ever was a fragrant harbour. University of the West Indies. St. Augustine, Trinidad. ROBERT WALLACE THOMPSON NOTES 1 Itcheong-U-Lam and Ian-Kuong-lam, Ou-Mun Kei-Leok (Monografia de Macau), Macao, 1950. 2 Chang lu Lin and Yin Kuang Jen, Ao Men Chi Lüeh (Gazetteer of Macao), Canton, c. 1751. See also Bawden C. R. "An eighteenth century Chinese source for the Portuguese dialect of Macao" in Silver Jubilee Volume of the Sinbun-Kagaku-Kenkyusyo, Kyoto, 1954, and Thompson, Robert Wallace, "Two synchronic cross-sections in the Portuguese dialect of Macao", Orbis, tome VIII, No. 1, Louvain, 1959, A NOTE ON LAND MEASUREMENT AND TENANT RENTALS IN HONG KONG. Land Measurement Under the laws of the Colony of Hong Kong all land is Crown Land, albeit some of it is under lease. The right to resumption of leased lands for a public purpose is retained in all leases. The following notes on local Chinese custom have mostly been acquired during investigations for the purpose of presenting the Crown's ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1968 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833948d 196 SUNG, Z. D. THE LIBRARY The symbols of Yi King; or, The symbols of the Chinese logic of changes. Shanghai, China Modern Education Co., 1934. SWALLOW, Robert W. Sidelights on Peking life. Peking, China Booksellers Ltd., 1927. TENG, Ssu-yü, and BIGGERSTAFF, Knight. An annotated bibliography of selected Chinese reference works. Rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass, Harvard U.P., 1950. (Harvard-Yenching studies, v. 2) TENG, Ssu-yü, and others. Japanese studies on Japan and the Far East; a short biographical and bibliographical introduction, prepared by Teng Ssu-yü with the collaboration of Masuda Kenji and Kaneda Hiromitsu. Hong Kong, University Press, 1961. THOMPSON, Robert Wallace. O dialecto português de Hongkong. Lisboa, Centro de Estudos Filológicos, 1961. THORBECKE, Ellen. People in China; thirty-two photographic studies from life. London, Harrap, 1935. TREGEAR, Thomas R. A survey of land use in Hong Kong and the New Territories. Hong Kong, University Press, 1958. TROTSKY, Leon. Problems of the Chinese revolution ... Tr. with an introd. by Max Shachtman. 2d ed. New York, Paragon Book Gallery, 1962. Reprint of 1st ed., 1932. TUN, Li-ch'en (E) Annual customs and festivals in Peking, as recorded in the Yen-ching sui-shih-chi. Tr. and annotated by Derk Bodde. 2nd ed., rev. Hong Kong, University Press, 1965. U.S. Library of Congress. Science and Technology Division. Mainland China organizations of higher learning in science and technology and their publications: a selected guide. Comp. by Chi Wang. Washington, D.C., U.S. Government Printing Office, 1961. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1995 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/95941j25g 118 only they could communicate with and work for the foreign traders, A familiar story is emerging. In the first of his series of articles in the China Mail of 1958 entitled "Pidgin Languages", Robert Wallace Thompson theorized: “In 'simplifying', most speakers tend to use the language one employs when speaking to a small child. Hence the superficial similarity of Pidgin speech and baby talk." I do not believe in this theory. The point is, the young makee-larn had to learn quickly. Any note-taking was confined by necessity to Chinese characters. The sounds had to fit the writing system available as best they could, and there was simply no time for the extreme complexities of English morphology, much of which was rooted in phonetic differences that Chinese people could in any case not hear, or only reproduce with great difficulty. As it was, the foreign traders were almost universally impressed by the calibre and honesty of their Chinese domestic and Factory staff. For a business season which lasted a few months a year, no-one was about to quibble over ropey English. The most that was required was to keep the vocabulary of daily life to a moderate base of general and domestic terms, not to make great demands on the use of complicated grammar, and accept whatever Chinesifications became current. How did consistent Chinese forms of English become current? Both Leland and Hunter have quoted the same answer, and it must be presumed to be broadly correct: — "In the Canton Bookshops near the Factories was sold a small pamphlet called "Devil's Talk". On the cover was a drawing of a foreigner in the dress of the middle of the last century - three-cornered hat, coat with wide skirts, breeches and long stockings, shoes with buckles, lace sleeves, and in his hand a cane. I have now one of these pamphlets before me. It commences thus, "yun" and under is its "barbarian" definition, expressed in another Chinese word whose sound is "man". After many examples of this kind come words of two syllables-thus: "kum-yat", with their foreign meaning expressed by two other Chinese characters pronounced "to-teay" today-and so on to sentences, for which the construction of the language is peculiarly ================================================================================