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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)

August 21, 2025 @ 12:49 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Etymology, Historical linguistics, Language and food

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