Chinese Riddle 4: Fresh Clipped Tomato

Eating out alone in Hong Kong may seem a great way to learn Chinese. When you get something so different that is hard to eat, you can feel discouraged, sad, helpless… but if you like the food, then you feel proud of being able to overcome the difficulties of the writing, of taming the monster character, of getting your reward. These emotions build memorable experiences about the process of learning. 

So one day I was wandering through the alleys of Mongkok looking for a new place to eat, when I came across this sign. Fresh something with egg. If you have read the post on riddle number 3, now you can understand the character for fresh, but what is the other one? It is not in the 
list of vegetables that you learn in school… 

So, let’s decompose the character, as we did for 鮮 ’fresh’ in riddle 3: In the character that follows 鮮, we can recognize 茄, which is composed by 3 parts, the key in the top, indicating the semantic field of the word, and two items below. Down left, the character meaning ‘force’, and down right, the character for ‘mouth’, which has been replaced here by a tomato. Therefore, we are talking about a vegetable which is strong in mouth (with a strong taste?). But, tomato? The character for tomato is 番茄, and there is another vegetable with that character: 茄子 ‘eggplant’. Then, 鮮茄 is 'fresh tomato' or 'fresh eggplant'? You don't ned to be William of Baskerville to realize that it is tomato (just read the translation underneath), but why?

I asked several locals, and for all of them it was evident that 鮮茄 was equivalent to 鮮番茄, and not to 鮮茄子. They all perceived 鮮茄 as a short form of 鮮番茄, which may seem counterintuitive for speakers of Romance languages, that shorten words by the end, and not by the beginning (like in Spanish "uni" for "universidad"). As a consecuence, I had to resort to linguistics to get the answer. 

In the one hand, we can distinguish a common root 茄 in both words, and we can guess that 子 (character root 39 'seed', 'child') is a historic diminutif, and a current part of the word. In the other hand, we can analyse 番茄 like the exotic (番) fruit designated by 茄, the eggplant. It seems evident to guess that the word for tomato is taken from the root of the word for eggplant and not the other way around, dince we know that tomato was introduced in Asia and Europe in the late 15th century, when Europe stablished contact with America. By the way, the history of eggplant was quite different in Asia and Europe, where it entered only through the Arabian conquest of Spain. Check the passionating etymology of eggplant here. 

In this way, in the sign of that restaurant in Mongkok we have a word 茄, that comes from 番茄. We are therefore looking at a mechanism of word formation. The English term for this method of word formation is "clipping", and it consists of cutting a part of the word, either in its left or right edge. The left edge is clipped more often in compound words like telephone > phone, refrigerator > fridge, or internet > net, but it is found also in non-compunded words: robot > bot, pyjamas > jamas. More frequent, for phonetic reasons, is the clipping of the right edge. Languages having a latin tradition, like Spanish, Italian and French say apocope for right clipping and apherese for left clipping.

It seems that in Chinese, clipping is a very frequent method of word formation, specially in spoken registers. In loan words like in 三文治 > 治 "sandwich", where characters are taken for their phonetic value, with a character for each syllable, and not for their meaning., clipping is usually in the left edge. Non-loan words can be clippind ni the right (1) or in the left (2)

               (1) 牛肉 > 牛 "beef (meat)"
               (2) 雞蛋 > 蛋 "(chicken) egg"

In syntactic terms, when it affects phrases like these, clipping can affect either the head (1) or the modifier (2). Also in Romance languages like Spanish we can still seen today the traces of the elliptic origin of many words, and specially food names: words like ternera 'beef', ciruela 'plum' and manzana 'apple' still display the typical ending of the adjectives they used to be.

And this procedure of word formation is so common that it can be found in any context that specifies the subject under discussion. In this way, for talking about the language (語) of 西班牙 'Spain', instead of 西班牙語, you will say 語. Equally, the language of 法國 will be 法語, instead of 法國語, clipping the syllable meaning 'country'.

So, do nt forget to clip tomatoes to serve them fresh! They will no longer those exotic eggplants, but you will be using proper chinese. And do not forget to try that menu of chicken with egg and fresh tomato.

PS: Achtung! There are two words for tomato!