Re: How close is Vietnamese to Mandarin or Cantonese?

Lee Sau Dan wrote:
>
> A lot of people suffer from typhoons. This includes speakers
of
> Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka, Hoklo, ... So, which one it is from
where
> English got this word? You have an answer?

Of course. It's Cantonese. The modern form is recorded and traceable to
one source, with name and date. That's not a problem. The problem is
that people tried to ascribe Greek origin to this word, and many
Chinese people even believed that typhoon was imported from English
into Chinese. That's the silly part. Your -ng -> -n is answered as well
in the following:

"The modern form of typhoon was influenced by a borrowing from the
Cantonese variety of Chinese, namely the word taaîfung, and respelled
to make it look more like Greek. Taaîfung, meaning literally "great
wind," was coincidentally similar to the Arabic borrowing and is
first recorded in English guise as tuffoon in 1699. The various forms
coalesced and finally became typhoon, a spelling that first appeared in
1819 in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound."

See:
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=typhoon

You've been missing this information a long time?

-- Ekki

.

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