Language Log

Spotted by Anthony Clayden in Taitung, Taiwan:

Photograph of a sign in downtown Taitung, Taiwan:

(Courtesy of Anthony Clayden)

From time to time during the past half century or so, I've heard of a food product called seitan.  Because the name sounds Japanese and it was associated with a natural food store in Cambridge, Massachusetts that I frequented called Erewhon (see here for the 1872 satirical Utopian novel by Samuel Butler whence it got its name) that was founded by Japanese macrobiotic advocates (see below for a bit more detail), I always assumed that it was both a Japanese word and a Japanese product.  As we shall find later in this post, I was (sort of) mistaken on both counts.

Taiwanese master baker Wu Pao-chun 吳寶春 with a loaf of his famous bread:

A tasty visual pun found on Facebook:

(originally posted by Wayne Hudson)

Earlier this week (11/12/18), under the rubric "Of knots, pimples, and Sinitic reconstructions", we discussed the origins and meaning of the fascinating Sinitic word "geda" ("pimple; knot; lump").  That, in turn, was prompted by our initial acquaintance with "geda" in "Too hard to translate soup" a couple of months before (9/2/18).  After considering a possible source in Indo-European, Turkic, Tungusic, and Mongolic, there seemed to be a bit of momentum in favor of the last named family.

Since "geda" first appeared in a significantly large number of citations in written Sinitic during the Mongol Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) about a thousand years ago, it was thought advisable to look at an earlier stage of Mongolic rather than simply referring to modern Mongolian forms.  So I thought of asking Daniel Kane, a rare specialist in Khitan, which is generally considered to be a Para-Mongolic language, whether he had any thoughts on the matter.

Tweet by Dan Okrent:

Menu translation, Hanoi pic.twitter.com/mDG3FH2Bd8

— Dan Okrent (@okrent) November 12, 2018

Tweet  by Noelle Mateer:

pic.twitter.com/ZKeOBldM0m

— Noelle Mateer (@n_mateer) November 13, 2018

Bill Benzon spotted this on Facebook:

Brand-name transliteration (in Embarcadero Center, San Francisco), courtesy of Nancy Friedman:

Here is a photograph of a paper placemat Tong Wang found in a restaurant serving Beijing dishes that is named "Sea Bowl Restaurant" (Hǎiwǎn jū 海碗居):

From Nikita Kuzmin:

From a correspondent in Taiwan: