The fort at Baimiwong, near Keelung, established by the Spanish and the Dutch on Taiwan
Some loanwords travel
from one language to another and then to another and so on. As for Dutch
loanwords, cookie is a good example. It started out as koekje, which was
taken to the New World by the Dutch, jumped ship to American English as cookie
and is now used in a host of other languages such as Korean. I have previously
written in this blog about Dutch loanwords in Japanese. Estimates vary, but
there are well over 150 such loanwords still in common use in Japanese. Japanese
exported some of these loanwords to other languages during the expansion of the
Japanese Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1895, in
the wake of the Japanese victory over Qing China in the first Sino-Japanese
War, Taiwan became a dependency of Japan and remained so until 1945. During
this period, the dominant form of Chinese spoken in Taiwan was Taiwanese Hokkien.
This variety evolved in southern China, in particular the province of Fujian. During
the Qing period many people from this region migrated to Taiwan (Mandarin would
only gradually become the dominant form of Chinese on Taiwan after the arrival
of Chiang Kai-Shek and the Kuomintang regime in 1949-1950). As a result of
contact between Japanese and Taiwanese Hokkien during the Japanese period.
Hokkien adopted many Japanese loanwords. In 2011, the Taiwanese government made a list of 172 commonly-used Japanese
words in Taiwanese Hokkien. Several of these are loanwords from Dutch. These
include ‘beer’ (Modern Taiwanese Language (MLT) transcription bielux/bieluq)
from the Dutch bier, ‘gas’ (gafsuq) (Dutch gas), ‘bag’ (khabarng)
from the old Dutch word kabas, and ‘cup’ (khokpuq) (Dutch kop).
The Dutch words had typically been modified to conform to Japanese
pronunciation. Today in Taiwan it is typically the older generation which still
speaks Hokkien (and some can still speak Japanese), but talking to younger people
they are still familiar with these words, although they are usually unaware
that they had made the journey across the world from Netherlands to East Asia.
