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Comment by SeanLuke | Hacker News Reader

What confuses me is that, though as I understand it Ketchup was a general term to decscribe a variety of sauces, in Cantonese it sounds exactly like Tomato ("Ke") Paste ("tchup"). Given its origins in southeast Asia, I had assumed that could not possibly be a coincidence.

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Wiktionary[1] says it’s “probably ultimately from Hokkien Chinese 膎汁 (kê-chiap, “fish sauce”)”. So not a million miles off?

[1]: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/ketchup

chiap sure? Ke no. In Cantonese, fish is yu. But yeah.

Also: I had thought it was originally Malay.

Malay "ketjap" or "kecap" (different types of soy sauces) comes from Chinese "kê-chiap". It may be directly inspired by Malay languages without knowledge of Chinese and still be "ultimately from Hokkien Chinese".

Hokkien/Min and Cantonese are not mutually intelligible languages.

Of course. We were talking about the coincidence in Cantonese.

膎 preserved fish, not 鱼 plain old fish.

Ah! Well it still doesn't help (it's haai in Cantonese). But that's interesting.

Tomatoes are relatively late addition to european cuisine (1500ish), there would be influences from a silk for centuries before. It sounds quite probable.

This comment sounds like you might mistakenly think tomatoes are Chinese.

I meant the origin for the word ketchup might have came as word for some type of sauce from the silk road, or tale of it from merchants eating it while traveling the silk road

Not sure exactly what you’re saying but the Europeans brought tomatoes to India and East Asia.

A reminder that tomatoes are native to South America, and did not exist anywhere else until colonization of the Americas.

Thank god for coloni, umm, borderless migration of people!

I can imagine some exec fine tuning the transliteration. Coca cola was first transliterated "bite the wax tadpole" or "female horse stuffed with wax". Coke then researched 40,000 Chinese characters and found a close phonetic equivalent, "ko-kou-ko-le," which can be loosely translated as "happiness in the mouth."

Leaving this here since the site hijacked ctrl+c to add its url: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/business-jokes/coca-col...

It's not branding, 茄汁 "kit chup" is literally how you'd say "sauce made from tomatoes" in Cantonese.

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