chau gong

[LanDi Liu]

Most of the stuff (by far) that comes up from searching "chau gong" is
about Chinese gongs, so one would assume (if assumptions aren't too
dangerous) that the etymology is Chinese.  The correct character, as
Doug Wilson asserted, is probably æ „.  www.baidu.com has 2,800 raw hits
for æ „é”£ (chao1luo2), which isn't terribly much, but maybe enough
considering that there are many different names for many different
kinds of gongs/tamtams in China, most of which are probably translated
into English as "chau gong" or "Chinese gong".  So as far as the
English etymology of "chau gong", that's probably it.  The Chinese
etymology of "æ „" (chao1) may be another interesting pursuit.  It seems
strange that that character was chosen, as it means "to copy, search,
or take".  None of the words that contain it that I can find in a
large dictionary have anything to do with sound.  It would make more
sense if it was "吵", which means "noise", but that only gets 6 Baidu
hits, so that's most likely a "misspelling".

Randy

On Thu, Jul 3, 2008 at 7:19 AM, Douglas G. Wilson <douglas at nb.net> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Douglas G. Wilson" <douglas at NB.NET>
> Subject:      Re: chau gong
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At the "Chinagong" web-site --
>
> http://www.chinagong.com/chinese/index.htm
>
> -- in the left-hand column, the first item is a "chao1 luo2", i.e.,
> "chao gong" as listed on the parallel English-language page.
>
> The character for "chao" is this one:
>
> http://www.xuezhongwen.net/chindict/chindict.php?cdqchi=%E6%8A%84
>
> I don't know why that's the name of the gong: maybe it's an arbitrary
> phonetic transcription of something else, maybe it's a place name, maybe
> .... Other sites also show this Chinese 'spelling'.
>
> -- Doug Wilson
>
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--
Randy Alexander
Jilin City, China
My Manchu studies blog:
http://www.bjshengr.com/manchu

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