Origin of Taiwanese place names

[quote=“hsinhai78”][quote=“hansioux”][quote=“hsinhai78”][quote=“hansioux”][quote=“Hokwongwei”]
[ul]1: Shilin: The area was home to a large number of schools and academies during the late Qing years, earning it the name “a forest of scholars”-- 士子如林, abbreviated to 士林 [/ul][/quote]

I think that’s probably a Chinese reinvention, like if someone were to say Kaohsiung is so named because it once had very tall bears. [/quote]

Kaohsiung is spelled 高雄 and not 高熊 . Whitey McWhite might think that way after two months summer school at Shida-MTC. :roflmao:[/quote]

Actually it’s spelt Takao and not Kaohsiung. Unfortunately if those in power were wilfully ignorant of the island’s history, there was nothing people could do about it.[/quote]

And New York is New Amsterdam. Names of places evolve and there is usually nothing people can do. Moreover, I do not see any effort of the DPP-led Kaohsiung city government or local groups to change the name. Who wants to live in “beat the dog” ?[/quote]

Oddly enough, the story I heard is the city actually got its old name from a group of sailors from NYC who were passing by Southern Taiwan in the mid 1800s and noticed an unusual bovine in the area. The NYC sailors started referring to the community “The Cow” but because of their heavy regional accents it sound more like “Da Cow” and thus we got Takao.

An alternate version of this story goes that after WWII there were a few American soldiers in the Southern Taiwan city who noticed a herd grazing on some open land by the waterfront, and they came to refer to the area as the “Cow Shore”. That name got mushed a little bit in Mandarin to Kaohsiung and stuck.

Hey, we’ve got Cow Palace in SF and Cowpens in the Carolinas . . . seems believable to me. :slight_smile:

a page about Changhua (彰化) place namesGot a new one. I was reading , and the entry about Hemei (和美) struck me. When you get to Hemei’s etymology, it’s a really common Austronesian place name, as common as Taowan, Pattsiran, Pulauan, Saisiyat, and Bali.

[quote]Hemei, once known as khah-lí-siān (卡里善), lau-lî-sán (朥狸散), has its etymology from the Babuza language, originally meaning “the boundary between hot and cold”. The subsequent 和美線 and 和美散 are variant phonetic transliterations, because 善, 散 and 線 has similar pronunciations.

『和美,曾經叫做「卡里善」、「朥狸散」,這是源自於巴布薩族的發音,意指「冷與熱的交界」,所以後來出現「和美線」、「和美散」的稱呼,因「善」、「散」、「線」音接近。』[/quote]

By the time the Japanese took over, they changed the old transliterations to 和美線, probably because 和 in Japanese can be read as Ka. So at least in the beginning of the Japanese rule, it was probably still called Ka-bi-sen.

According to August 13, 1920’s Taiwan nichi nichi shinpō (臺灣日日新報), the newest location name reform shortened the name from 和美線 to just 和美.

From then on the place was called Wabi, at least that’s what was written on the US WW2 surveillance map.

So the name of 和美 evovled as such:

? → Kalisian (Taigi) → Kabisen (Japanese) → Wabi (Japanese) → Hemei (Mandarin) → Hōbí (Taigi)

As previously mentioned, Kalisian is a common Austronesian place name. There are at least two places that shared similar transliteration prior to Chinese settlements reaching the area during the Qing rule.

One is 佳里 (Taigi: Kali) in Tainan, right next to Mattau, which used to be called 佳里興 (Kalisin) and 傀儡興 (Kalesin).

The other is the locative name 傀儡大山 (ka-lé mountain, probably Dawushan 大武山 today). According to the Aboriginal historical and linguistic encyclopedia, the possible etymology for 傀儡 is a Paiwan locative name Karisi.

There is a place in Northern Philippines called Carasi. I tried looking for the etymology for that place, but I get a pretty made up answer like it’s a combination of Spanish words carayo (love) and caasi (charity).
goo.gl/maps/GBgivdAGA172

So it’s possible Hemei’s name also shares this etymology, although the encyclopedia did not provide an explanation for why the Paiwan village was called Karisi. I don’t know how accurate “the boundary between hot and cold” etymology for Karisi is either…

It doesn’t say anything about an exhibition, but it’s nice to see this kind of interest in history at a school. The one name the article explains is

Nantou’s Caotun Township (草屯), which was named for countless travelers who discarded their straw sandals there after buying new ones.

Travelers that used to pass through the town on their way to Puli Township (埔里) would wear out their sandals walking on the uneven roads from Taichung, Weng said, adding that the town’s original name was Tsaohsieh Tun (草鞋墩), or “straw sandal mound.”

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So I was wondering if anyone could help me find a particular town that my grandmother was born in. My dad only knows the Taiwanese name for it, which is something like tiū-kang-a (possibly 稻江仔 in Hanzi). Any idea where somewhere like this around the Changhua area would be? Figure this would be the best place to ask.

hmm… there is a school named 稻江 in Jiayi, but that’s not exactly around Changhua.

It’s possible that 稻江仔, and even tiū-kang-á aren’t the right transcription for the sound.

Try finding it in these historical maps
http://gissrv4.sinica.edu.tw/gis/changhua.aspx

Can i ask a question. Not sarcasm.

How did hit dog turn into kaohsiung?

The Makatau people living in the area called the place Takau. It was translated in Holo (Taigi) as Tánn-káu (打狗). That was a decent phonetic translation. When the Japanese came, they thought the Kanji meaning is terrible. So they retranslated it to Taka-o (高雄), which is a existing location name in Japan. The Japanese did this to several Taiwanese place names. When the KMT came, they simply couldn’t careless what the locals actually called the place, and just read the Japanese Kanji in Mandarin.

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萬華 is another example, I guess 艋舺 was just too WTF for them.

Interestingly, it is one of the rare examples where the translator seems to know the meaning of the original place name. Bangka means boat or canoe, and shares a root with Polynesian words such as waka and va’a. So in addition to getting the phonetic part right, the translator also added the boat radical 舟 to both syllables.

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That is interesting, I had heard that it meant canoe originally but never thought about it.

1922 Japanese released name change table for 44 train stations.

If 銅鑼 was originally named 銅鑼灣, it’s pronunciation would be more similar to tâng-lô-uan, so probably a phonetic transcription of an Aboriginal place name that ends with -an.

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Grave dig…

Some Spanish place names, such as Santiago, has more staying power than the Dutch ones for some reason.

The Spanish named a place on the North Coast Punta Diablo because it is prone to shipwrecks.

That place’s name in Taigi is Iá-liú, which some have proposed to be a corruption of Diablo, which in Mandarin is Yeliu (野柳).

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I have a new pet theory for Penghu (澎湖)'s etymology.

The earliest records that have high probabilities of being present day Penghu were 方壺 (Fanghu) and 平湖 (Pinghu).

方壺 is mentioned as early as the 5th century, although they are all mentioned in passing. One is in the annotation of the Book of the Later Han for a mountain in Hunan named 壺頭山 (Hutoushan), which says it is so named because it looks similar to the 方壺 island in the East Sea. The mountain is still named that today.

壺頭,山名也,在今辰州沅陵東。武陵記曰「此山頭與東海方壺山相似,神仙多所游集,因名壺頭山」也。

The other one is in the Book of Southern Qi, as a part of a poem written by 張融 (Zhang Rong) on his boat ride from Zhejiang to 交州 (Jiaozhou, present day Northern Vietnam). In which he mentioned 方壺 and paralleled it with the mythical island of 蓬萊 (Penglai).

曬蓬萊之靈岫,望方壺之妙闕。

There is no concrete fact that 方壺 is Penghu, but phonetically it is very similar. 平湖 on the other hand is definitely Penghu, and it was first coined in Southern Song dynasty records.

Hanji Middle Chinese Taigi
方壺 pjang hu pang-ôo
平湖 bjæng hu pênn-ôo
澎湖 bæng hu pênn-ôo

My pet theory is that the name for the island came from the Austronesian word for sea turtle, *peñu.

The word for sea turtle in Kavalan is pennu, in Pinuyumayan is penu, in Malay it’s penyu, in Tongan it’s fonu, in Maori and Hawaiian it’s honu.

Picrite basalt used to make tools and build stone coffins and building support by prehistoric cultures in Tainan and Taidong came from Penghu. So there’s archeological evidence that Indigenous peoples in Taiwan could reach Penghu since 6000 to 5000 years ago and ferry stone tools and slabs back to Taiwan.

There are several locations in Penghu today named after sea turtles in Chinese, such as 金龜頭 (Jin-gui-tou) at the mouth of Magong harbor, now renamed 金龍頭 because some people can’t get their heads out of the gutter), and 奎壁 (Gui-bi), which was originally named 龜鼈山 (Gui-bi shan) which straight up just means turtle mountain.

Considering the facts, the original inhabitants on the island were probably also Austronesian. Sea turtle was probably much more abundant on the islands back then. Hence the early Austronesians probably named the islands *peñu after sea turtles, like the many Sinitic sea turtle place names on the islands that came later. The *peñu location name was then borrowed into Sinitic languages after early contact between the Sinitic speaking and Austronesian/proto-Kra-Dai speaking peoples around the Han dynasty as 方壺 (pjang hu).

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Thank you for sharing your etymological findings. Impressive and educational.

Can you please further explain on the quote below, since I am not familiar with such slang terms?

Thank you much!

Despite plenty of places around Taiwan are named after 龜頭, see this post:

Most Taiwanese today only associate 龜頭 with glans.

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She was probably just a feminist.

The original form of Austronesian culture is matrilineal, and only women inherit land and property.

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Is that still known anywhere in Taiwan? When did it fade out?

Technically Pangcah and Puyuma are still matrilineal.

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So I was looking up some place name that starts with ka- and ends with -an which seems to be very common, and that reminded me of this old post, where I proposed the origin of Hemei 和美 was Kalisian.

I decided to see if I could find an entry of ka-lisi-an and figure out what it means. Turns out, I was wrong, instead of ka- + -an, the origin instead was qali- + -an. The qali- initial is reserved for things that are holy, or connected to the spiritual world. The examples are rainbow *qali-waRwaR, butterfly *qali-baŋbaŋ, and whirlwind *qali-puspus. This “prefix for words with a sensitive reference to the spirit world” often evolves into kali- or ali-.

For our case, qalís means “to change place or activity”
https://www.trussel2.com/ACD/acd-s_q.htm?fbclid=IwAR0-Z7i04Ibb1xsi3sb9Km9vUJNqjl6_DBEaorTrY2cd0rZGTWoA9Cs27Do#32666

This seems to match the “the boundary between hot and cold” explanation given for Hemei.

Since this word was probably the etymology for 傀儡山 (ka-lé-san, present day Jiayi 嘉義, as well as Alishan 阿里山), 佳里興 (Kalisin, present day Tainan Jiali), and 卡里善 (khah-lí-siān, present day Changhua Hemei), they seems to share something in common.

Since the Tropics of Cancer passes right through Jiayi, naming it Kalisian (places where it changes from hot to cold) seems to make perfect sense.

Also, now I think about it, when the Qing government renamed 傀儡 (ka-lé) to 嘉義 (ka-gī), it wasn’t that big of a change for speakers of Taigi.