Udon, wontons, & pansit
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(Since we have previously had lively discussions on subjects related to today's topic, I will publish this essay as is, but with the admonition that it is for advanced Siniticists, though naturally all Language Log readers are welcome to partake.)
[This is a guest post by Kirinputra]
I was (routinely) digging into the etymology of Taioanese U-LÓNG, which, like UDON, comes from Japanese うどん, and it turns out that うどん is cognate to WONTON, Cantonese 雲吞 (of c.), & Mandarin 馄饨.
The 廣韻 has 餛飩; so does Cikoski, with the gloss K[IND OF] DUMPLING. So the word is pretty ancient. 集韻 has it written 䐊肫, apparently. Using that as a search term, I found an article on your blog, but the commenters were generally unaware that 餛飩 had this alternate form in the medieval book language. (Of c., the person that wrote 䐊肫湯 may not have known either.)
I broadened my search. One depressing takeaway (once again) is that "Chinese" etymology is in this kind of arrested infancy. Even among linguists, broadly speaking, it's like etyma have no time dimension; only sinographs (if even) do.
What strikes me about the etymology of UDON is that a dumpling word became a mein word at some point.
Besides U-LÓNG, there is no 餛飩 cognate in Taioanese. Mainstream Hokkien & Teochew also don't have 餛飩 cognates AFAIK, although my guess is some dialects might've borrowed Cantonese 雲吞 or (in Quemoy) Taioanese U-LÓNG. The general Hokkien-Taioanese word for WONTON is PIÁN-SI̍T 扁食 — PÁN-SI̍T in some dialects, incl. in the late-antique (1500s-1800) Maritime Chiangchew 漳州 dialect that super-spread culture words throughout the tropics up to Rangoon. So the Philippine word PANSIT (PANCIT) is from PÁN-SI̍T. However, while PÁN-SI̍T is a dumpling word, PANSIT (PANCIT) is mostly a mein word. The exception is PANCIT MOLO, a specialty of the Iloilo borough of Molo, which is dumpling soup w/o noodles, which threw me the first time I ordered it. Standard PANSIT is equivalent to chow mein.
My guess is that PANSIT (the etymon) transitioned after a critical period where wontons were always sold with noodles in the streets — still the tendency in many ports, or places. At some point, the masses took the word PANSIT to mean the noodles. I wonder if UDON evolved the same way.
Selected readings
- "'The Sway Mo' Blues'" (3/1/25) — a very long virtuoso post with a lengthy bibliography on Taiwanese and related matters, not to be missed
- "A variable, transcriptional Chinese character" (2/24/14) — see especially the paragraph on the Singapore dish called "laksa"
- "Chaos" (12/19/18)
- "Reclamation of a wasteland by an army unit" (2/11/10; update 8/29/22) — I remember that this was a hard nut to crack
- "Soused noodles / face" (1/5/21)
- "Prefixes and suffixes for common Japanese dishes" (8/13/24)
- "Phoshime" (8/7/24)
- "Chinese and Japanese Terms for Food Textures" (8/10/23)
- "Zo sashimi" (8/10/19)
- "A Stew with a Consonant Shift" (8/5/16)
- "Teppanyaki" (3/17/13)
- "Pulled noodles: Uyghur läghmän and Mandarin lāmiàn" (8/8/14)
- "Wonton in Zanthoxylum schinifolium etzucc sauce" (5/6/15)
- "Wanton soup" (1/5/15)
- "Wantan soup for überman hubby" (3/15/14)
- "Fry the red hand" (1/23/16)
- "Hong Kong-specific characters and shorthand" (3/15/15)
- "Fragrant and Hot Marxism" (12/20/15)
- "Crab raccoon" (9/1/24)
- "'Geda', part 3" (11/15/18)
- "Of knots, pimples, and Sinitic reconstructions" (11/12/18)
- "Too hard to translate soup" (9/2/18)
- "Rice noodle sense: Sino-Anglo-Nipponica" (1/11/24)
- "Drawing a line in the noodles" (8/14/11)
- "'Please wait outside a noodle'" (12/29/20)
- "Dumpling ingredients and character amnesia, part 2" (4/25/22)
Jonathan Smith said,
August 21, 2025 @ 1:09 pm
My guess would relate to a large gray area joining noodle and wonton — depending on where you're at, a so-called wonton is pretty much a noodle… wide/long and hardly any filling at all. Some regional udons also have the double-wide look but IDK re: filling…
Also IDK ultimately whence pián-sit etc. but if etymologically flat + food, it is (relatively) new to Min languages… Hakka mayhaps?
More generally re: the medieval "rime" dictionaries, to an underestimated extent these include nonce writings of regionalisms, many of them southern.
YD said,
August 22, 2025 @ 1:20 am
Fascinating. Just want to add that "pangsit" in Indonesia is a dumpling word. "Mi ayam pangsit" would usually be noodle + chicken + fried wonton.
Chris Button said,
August 22, 2025 @ 7:37 am
Since you roll the ingredients out flat before cutting the noodles strips or dumpling wrappers out, I wonder if 麪/麵 is ultimately related to 扁?
KIRINPUTRA said,
August 22, 2025 @ 9:16 am
@ YD
Yes!
@ Jonathan Smith
That would be my guess, possibly via some other close-by language, like Hokchew 福州語.
Chris Button said,
August 22, 2025 @ 2:50 pm
From an old 2014
LLog post
by Professor Mair:
"Nearly two decades ago, I wrote a very long and detailed proposal for considering the Sinitic word mài 麥 ("wheat") as having been derived from an Indo-European source. This is on pp. 36b-38a of "Language and Script: Biology, Archaeology, and (Pre)History," International Review of Chinese Linguistics, 1.1 (1996), 31a-41b.
I think that it is possible that miàn 麵 ("flour; noodles") may well be a nasalized cognate of the IE word for "wheat". After all, we do know that wheat came to China from the west, and we also know that wheat was an important item in life and death for the Bronze Age inhabitants of the Tarim Basin, whose language was likely to have been Indo-European. If anyone wants references, I can provide them."
Chris Button said,
August 22, 2025 @ 3:06 pm
The PIE root in question is *melh₂- "grind", which I don't believe is the source of 麥 (I assume a different external source), but a possible association with 麵 is interesting. Incidentally, Pulleyblank (1975) compares 磨 *mál "grind" with PIE *melh₂-.
(Sorry – I know I'm straying from the original topic now)
Chris Button said,
August 22, 2025 @ 6:26 pm
While the -l ~ -n coda alternation is by no means unheard of, I wonder if we can go further with this possible loanword and conduct some idle speculation?
There is ample evidence in Old Chinese for /χ-/ sometimes surfacing as [χᵑ-] (> ŋ-) in onset position (e.g. 蘇 with phonetic 魚 and a semantic relationship with 悟, or time words like 歲 and 月, or the Tai h- onset for 五, etc.).
The so-called "spontaneous nasalization", which Ohala (1992) associates with "high airflow segments like voiceless fricatives", is a good phonetic explanation for this.
Now, if PIE /-lh₂/ is [-lχ] and being heard as [-lχᵑ], then an association with Chinese [-nʰ] is perhaps plausible (via -lŋ > -n and -nᵡ > -nʰ)
Chris Button said,
August 22, 2025 @ 8:29 pm
But then again, the character 麵 is a late one (although that does not necessarily mean the word is also that late).
So, here's a third option. How about a relationship with 棉/綿 "cotton"?
Chris Button said,
August 23, 2025 @ 9:44 am
A few more tidbits.
The Shijing has 綿 as "elongated, drawn out". A later semantic extension into 棉 "cotton" and 麪/麵 "noodles" seems reasonable.
But the earlier flour meaning for 麪/麵 needs to be connected. While 麵 is a late character, its predecessor 麪 is at least in the Shuowen where it includes 麪 as 麥末也. It also has 餅 as 麪餈也.
Chris Button said,
August 23, 2025 @ 10:25 pm
Matasović (2009:264) "Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Celtic" has *menā "flour", attested in Old Irish as men in that sense.
That seems to be a likely source for 麪/麵 in its original "flour" sense. The later "noodles" meaning could just be an extension of that.
Now where did 棉/綿 come from?
Chris Button said,
August 23, 2025 @ 10:53 pm
Perhaps, despite the external origin of cotton itself, the name is an internal coinage/calque of "tree floss" as in the attested form 木綿/木棉. That would then explain the emergence of 棉 as a later variant of 綿 that replaces 糸 with 木.
Yves Rehbein said,
August 24, 2025 @ 6:07 am
@ Chris Button, how does that relate to UDON?
Note German Maultaschen "hot pockets". The surface analysis of Maul "muzzle, snout" seems to suggest a metaphor refering to a feed bag, or nosebag, a bag filled with fodder for a horse to feed from.
Incidentally, Wiktionary corroborates kǒuwěn 口吻 "muzzle", wěn 吻 MC mjunX? The similarity to wantan, apparently from Cantonese 雲吞 (logophoric in reference to steam, I guess), from 餛飩, seems to be accidental, but note the meaning of the Japanese reflex こんとん konton "steamed manjū or steamed mochi": viz. 饅頭「 まんじゅう」, 餅「もち」. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/饅頭