Researcher @SinologieFAU. 曩昔 @mpilhlt @ceao_uam. PhD @tohoku_univ. 東亞政法史を硏鑽し、言語学についての豆知識を多く呟いとる。 'Too much in love with my primary sources.'
The etymology of *wa 倭 is hotly contested and ultimately uncertain: Quite possibly it was the phonetic transcription of some now unknown Japanese name. 2/11
Teochew and Hokkien are quite similar and there is some degree of mutual intelligibility, but at the same time they are also distinct from each other. Left is the Gospel of Matthew in Teochew; right is the same text in Hokkien. 3/ 
Xifan 西番/西蕃 (West foreign) could be used as a generic, but it also got pinned down specifically. The 15ct 大明一統志 writes: "Xi-fan is Tu-fan 吐蕃."
Who doesn't love a succulent mango or a scrumptious mango juice? They are called soāiⁿ(-á) in Hokkien and suain7 檨 in Teochew, which is cognate to Vietnamese xoài 𣒱 and Khmer svaay... 2/ 
You can also write 'hanging' as 弔 instead of 吊, and hence also the profanity, as Morrison did in 1822: 2/
The Tang succeeded in founding a stable state that firmly united China after centuries of division (well, let's not forget the hapless Sui 581/9-618, but they collapsed quickly and didn't come to be remembered for their glory as the Tang did) 2/ 
瀉 is very rare in Japanese. Since 寫 gets simplified to 写, Japanese (apparently since Edo times) often informally simplified 潟 to 泻, replacing the right element and writing Niigata as 新泻 2/ 
Siâu 潲 (or 洨) means 'semen,' so siáⁿ-siâu 啥潲 is very close in meaning to 'what the f'. You can it after a lot of verbs: 講 (wtf are you saying), 看 (wtf are you looking at), 創 (wtf are you doing) etc. ... 2/ 
sap-bûn 雪文 (soap), from Malay sabun (probably, this a bit is contested; ultimately this is a Germanic word and cognate with the English soap) 2/ 
Obviously, in imperial times there was no portrait whatsoever hanging on that spot - here's a photo of the Gate during the late Qing (1900). 2/ 
The most well-known example, which got its hoax baidu-pedia entry in 2009 and topped a list of "4 (later 10) mythical creatures" is the Grass-mud horse 草泥馬 (cao ni ma) , which is a pun for... "f*ck your mother"肏你媽 2/ 
Orthographically, 桉 is an old character. You find it in the Kangxi Dictionary of 1716. But back then, eucalyptus was unknown in the Sinophone world, and the character had nothing to do with eucalyptus. 2/ 
The ultimate origin of the name is not 100% clear, but what is clear is that our story starts with an Austronesian root and that its pronunciation had absolutely nothing to do with 'Kaohsiung.' Rather we are dealing with the word Takao. 2/ 
The ultimate etymology of Xiamen is not 100% clear, and there is a range of differring interpretations. It seems likely, however, that Xiamen was originally 'Lower Gate' 下門 and then got rewritten as the more 'elegant' 'Mansion Gate' 廈門 2/ 
First of all an anticlimactic start: 美國 and 米國 do not really mean "beautiful country" or "rice country" in Chinese (not primarily at least; the association of beauty for 美 probably appeared quite early). They also have nothing to do with the flag. 2/
