Chop-chop look at mixed lingo
When Winnie, a Hong Kong manager, was planning to emigrate to the United States, she asked her American husband Tom whether she would be able to get congee over there. 'Sure,' he said. 'But congee's a Chinese word. We'd call it rice gruel in English.' 'No,' said Winnie. 'Congee is an English word. In Chinese, we call it juk.
If it's gruel in English and juk in Chinese, what language is congee? They were baffled. A similar mystery surrounded the word catty (one catty is 1.333 pounds or 0.6 of a kilogram) which English speakers assume is Chinese and they in turn assume is English. Other 'in-between' words are 'coolie' and 'amah'.
During the present period of heated debate over whether English or Chinese is the best language for education, let us take a trip through the history of fraternisation between the languages used in Hong Kong.
The first dwellers here spoke Cantonese. But when Hong Kong became an international entrepot in the 1840s, the language of business was Pidgin, which consisted of English vocabulary, extended with words from Portuguese, Indian and Chinese, and assembled with Chinese syntax.
This is almost incomprehensible to the modern English speaker. 'There's no food upstairs - tell the servant to bring the stuff up speedily or I'll give him 100,000 lashes' would be translated: 'No got chow-chow topside, you talkee foki bring chow chop-chop or Master give him one lakh whip.' At the same time, the Chinese spoken locally acquired many English words. Some were transliterated according to sound, such as saam mun jee for sandwich, ba see for bus and dik see for taxi. In other cases, words were specially coined, such as dihn wa (electric speech) for telephone.
Pidgin gradually lost its Portuguese and Indian elements and became a type of simplified English which survived until recent days. A conversation between a European architect and his 70-year-old 'cook-boy' Ah-Wong was recorded by Eric Cumine in his 1981 book Hong Kong Ways and Byways, presumably having occurred in the 1970s.
'This is Mr Brown speaking.' 'Mr Brown no home.' 'I am telling you that I am Mr Brown.' 'My talk you Mr Brown no home.' 'You damn fool I am Mr Brown.' 'Damn fool you I talkee you Mr Brown no home. You damn fool you no talk English.' A few Portuguese elements lasted through much of this century. Ever wondered why Hong Kong characters in James Clavell novels (such as Noble House, set in the 1960s) constantly exclaim 'Joss'? What Clavell had heard was the Portuguese exclamation 'Dios' (God), slightly mispronounced. Until about 15 years ago, the word lakh (Hindi for 100,000) was widely used as a number in Hong Kong.