The “A” Vegetable
July 31st, 2006 by MarkTaiwan has been westernized over long enough a period of time that there’s an increasingly large number of words for which the Taiwanese rely on English to some degree or another. What I’m talking about isn’t when people sprinkle English words into their sentences for whatever reason; what I’m talking is vocabulary items for which they never use Chinese, and for which they don’t know the Chinese.
One of those things is A菜, i.e., the “A” vegetable. Every Taiwanese grocery store I’ve ever seen sells A菜. Everybody knows what it is, and nobody knows what’s it’s called in Chinese. I myself eat it almost every day and yet, I had no clue there was a real Chinese name for it until I visited the mainland.
The A Vegetable (and seafood tofu balls) Hosted on ZooomrWhile I was in Shanghai, eating hotpot with John, and his wife (a Shanghai native), I mentioned “A菜”. Neither had ever heard of such a thing and found the name funny. Over the next couple of days, I asked several more Chinese people. Their reactions were all the same; they all thought it was hilarious. So, the question is, just how did “A菜” come to be known as “A菜”?
Update: Mark S. contributed a photo of A菜 in a labelled bag.
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August 1st, 2006 at 11:27 pm
What is it exactly? Like shape, size and color?
August 1st, 2006 at 11:31 pm
Wow, you were fast with that comment! I’ve added a picture to the post.
August 1st, 2006 at 11:33 pm
Haha, thanks. I didn’t even realize.
August 1st, 2006 at 11:46 pm
That looks like 小白菜 .
August 2nd, 2006 at 1:01 am
A – from Arden.
Arden Lettuce. 別名：A菜、窩仔菜 學名：Lactuca sativa L.
August 2nd, 2006 at 1:42 am
I think that name comes from Taiwanese. It should be “Ei-a菜”. If you say it fast it would sound like “A菜”. I grew up eating it but I have no idea what it meant. My guessing is
1. “矮仔“菜 (shorty)
or
2. “鞋仔“菜 (shoes)
It depends on which tone the “Ei” is pronunced. (high tone for shorty, rising for shoes)
August 2nd, 2006 at 11:19 am
Here’s a photo of a label for A-cai.
August 2nd, 2006 at 1:34 pm
I think this is just romaine lettuce, or something very similar. That’s what a few Google searches seems to turn up.
August 2nd, 2006 at 6:16 pm
i would also say it looks like 白菜 too. its called that in japan aswell.
oh, and im typing this on my psp im so cool
August 2nd, 2006 at 10:59 pm
Mark wrote:
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I had no clue there was a real Chinese name for it until I visited the mainland.
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Would the “real Chinese name” that you learned be 葉萵苣 (”leaf lettuce”)? Here’s a page [http://tinyurl.com/jq87h] with an image that shows that Mandarin name. Romaine lettuce is called 長葉萵苣 (”long leaf lettuce”) in Mandarin. Scroll down this page [http://tinyurl.com/h7mcj] to see more about Chinese-language variations on the lettuce theme.
For what it’s worth, my wife insists that the “A” is simply from the pronunciation and that it’s just a name which is written that way in order to preserve the Taiwanese pronunciation without destroying the meaning (”short/shoe vegetable”). Think “K書” (”hit the books”), for example where “K” is how the Taiwanese word for “hit” is pronounced.
August 3rd, 2006 at 12:19 am
Tim, I’m a bit confused by your post. You said that “A” is written so as to preserve the meaning. Which meaning are you talking about, “short” or “shoes”? Also, I should point out that when I said “Chinese name”, I meant Mandarin, not Southern Min.
Hmm… the quotes make me wonder if you doubt that it has a Chinese name. No, it wasn’t that. Unfortunately, whatever I heard, I didn’t write it down. I think it was 莴仔菜. Maybe some Chinese reader will be kind enough to confirm this.
August 3rd, 2006 at 2:04 pm
I confused Mark, so he wrote:
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You said that “A” is written so as to preserve the meaning.. Which meaning are you talking about, “short” or “shoes”?
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What I wrote was:
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…preserve the Taiwanese pronunciation without destroying the meaning…
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I’ll admit, my parenthetical addition (”short/shoe vegetable”) just after that was probably what caused the confusion.
To clarify, it was in reference to Mindy’s translation of the Taiwanese “Ei-a” as possibly meaning “short” or “shoe.” Using the Mandarin characters for either of those words as a substitute for the “A” pronunciation would destroy the meaning. The meaning which is preserved is simply the part about the “vegetable” – one which is neither short nor used to make shoes. The “A” doesn’t really “preserve” anything on its own so much as not destroy the original meaning. (Yes, the difference is rather subtle.)
Lastly, you wondered:
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Also, I should point out that when I said “Chinese name”, I meant Mandarin, not Southern Min.
[...]
Hmm… the quotes make me wonder if you doubt that it has a Chinese name.
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Are you saying that “葉萵苣” is Southern Min? As for the second part just above, I was wondering if it was “real,” merely because you didn’t tell us.
I used the quotes because I was quoting you.
August 3rd, 2006 at 8:02 pm
What about 大陸妹? It’s a similar lettucy veg that people eat stir-fried. What’s the difference between 大陸妹 and A-veg and what is its etymology? I’ve been told (by one person) that it might be called 大陸妹 because it is really cheap. That seems both offensive and unlikely. I’ve theorized that it is some kind of romaine and “大陸妹” could be some kind of super-funky transliteration of “romaine”.
August 3rd, 2006 at 9:44 pm
People do that with certain words in Taiwan. I think it is less a Western influence than a transcription of a Taiwanese sound for which there is no equivalent sound in Mandarin. “Q”, meaning chewy, is another example I hear all the time. Myself, I try to avoid saying Mainland word equals correct/real Chinese v. Taiwanese Mandarin word equals something other. There are simply different ways of saying things in different places at different times, even in one language. However, that is just my personal preference.
August 3rd, 2006 at 10:32 pm
The point was just that in Taiwan, I occasionally run into words for which Taiwanese people can’t or won’t use a completely Chinese word. By Chinese, I mean something that can be written in Chinese characters, rather than characters borrowed from the English (i.e. Roman characters).
I never saw this in mainland China, and people I met were amazed to hear what words the Taiwanese use for some words. The word for “band-aid” is another example. Mainlanders use a fully Chinese name for it, but Taiwanese use the English letters “OK” inside their name for it.
August 3rd, 2006 at 11:54 pm
It is a fascinating phenomenon. I hear people say “很 Q” all the time lately.
August 4th, 2006 at 12:12 am
The other fascinating thing about the use of these letters in Taiwan is that they are not functioning alphabetically. “Q” for instance is acting like a character; it represents a word and not a letter, or should I say phoneme.
August 4th, 2006 at 1:50 am
Yeah. I thought about “Q” also, but I didn’t mention it, since some people use a Chinese phrase. I’m not that surprised when people routinely use English (or an approximation of English) for computer terms, either. But a vegetable doesn’t seem like something people would take a loan word for!
The other thing that’s interesting, but sort of off topic is this: I have several Taiwanese-American friends back home, whose parents speak Southern Min as a first language. One of my friends fathers visited Taiwan recently and was enraged to see the current state of Taiwanese as a “lowbrow” language that “can’t be written”. He claims to be able to write all the Minnanhua he knows in Chinese characters and he also says that there’s a great wealth of poetry and literature written in the language. He found the idea that kids are resorting to a romanization system to learn the language shocking.
Stuff like that really makes me wonder how the language lost so much. Were speakers always illiterate, i.e., did they have to rely on Mandarin to write? Did they only forget after the 國民黨 came? Has the language changed so much in the past century that it used to be writable in Chinese, but isn’t now? I should make a whole post about this…
August 4th, 2006 at 2:59 am
A-tsai sounds like a short, convenient way to preserve the Taiwanese pronunciation. When dealing with food, Taiwanese rules (ed?) because the mainlanders who came over were married to Taiwanese wives who dealt with all the food. So I think in the market place among the 40 plus crowd, even those people who feel more comfortable in Mandarin refer to fruits/vegetables with the Taiwanese pronunciation. Of the little Taiwanese I picked up when I was in Taiwan (I learned Mandarin pretty well), most of it had to do with food because my mostly Mandarin speaking friends would still use Taiwanese to refer to it.
August 4th, 2006 at 10:39 am
“Stuff like that really makes me wonder how the language lost so much. Were speakers always illiterate, i.e., did they have to rely on Mandarin to write?”
There were plenty of literate people in Taiwan throughout Qing times and up to the present day. They could even read the same texts as were read elsewhere. They just pronounced them in Minnanyu whereas people in North China pronounced them in Mandarin, people in Japan pronounced them in Japanese, people in Vietnam pronounced them in Vietnamese, etc.
When the KMT came to Taiwan, they promoted Mandarin as Guoyu–the official spoken language and the “correct” way to pronounce Chinese texts. In so doing, they demoted Minnanyu (Taiwanese). That’s why it lost so much.
August 4th, 2006 at 2:49 pm
Is that your microwave, Mark? Nice sticker on the front door – very Taiwanese of you.
My inlaws were horrified when I took the “It’s a SONY” sticker off the screen of my TV…
August 4th, 2006 at 5:42 pm
I think I’ve heard that Min-nan-hua is closer to the way classical chinese used to be spoken than mandarin. It would be fascinating to go back in time and hear what 李白 and 杜埔 actually sounds like when they spoke.
August 7th, 2006 at 12:50 am
I’m surprised to find that nobody mentioned the name 油麦菜, which is the best known name of A 菜 in Guangdong. In Cantonese pinyin it should be “Yau Mak Choi”.
August 7th, 2006 at 7:37 pm
I was going to bring up the “Q” business: one of my favorite police shows is Q 狼特動組, or “Q Wolf Squad”.
August 7th, 2006 at 10:31 pm
I was going to respond to this the other day at Starbuck’s:
“Stuff like that really makes me wonder how the language lost so much. Were speakers always illiterate, i.e., did they have to rely on Mandarin to write?”
There have been people literate in Chinese texts in Taiwan from Qing times up to the present. They just pronounced the Chinese script in Taiwanese, just as Japanese pronounced it using Japanese, Koreans pronounced it using Korean, and Vietnamese pronounced it using Vietnamese. When the KMT came to Taiwan, they enforced Mandarin in the schools and looked down on Taiwanese. They associated the learning of written Chinese with Mandarin. That is how the language lost so much.
August 9th, 2006 at 1:09 am
Just want to respond to what Eli said, about pronouncing Chinese sript in Taiwanese.
The only source I know of that people still read Chinese texts in Taiwanese is in Taiwanese-speaking churches.
Here’s a page where you can listen to books of bible that were read in Taiwanese:
http://bible.fhl.net/new/audio_hb.php?version=1
August 9th, 2006 at 7:40 am
I meant in the past. Daoist priests-at least some–are another example.
August 9th, 2006 at 7:36 pm
Mindy wrote:
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The only source I know of that people still read Chinese texts in Taiwanese is in Taiwanese-speaking churches.
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I recommend that Mindy take a look at the results of this Google search for “請用台語唸” (which means “Please read [this] using Taiwanese pronunciation”).
To correct my own possible inaccuracies above, take a look at this dictionary entry which translates “A菜” (Mandarin) to Taiwanese as “萵仔菜 [=eu-a.tsai]” (which is how my mother-in-law pronounces it) and to English as “romaine lettuce.”
August 9th, 2006 at 9:53 pm
Something else I hadn’t thought about in my comment above: Japanese rule of the island. Japanese was the official language and Taiwanese authors wrote mainly in Japanese. Then, they had to re-learn Chinese–or learn it for the first time.
August 10th, 2006 at 2:22 am
The Taiwanese who made that dictionary are pretty delusional if they’re calling A菜 “Mandarin”. You might as well be trying to study English in India.
August 10th, 2006 at 10:35 pm
Back again. Well, it is Mandarin, in the sense that people say that in Mandarin, at least in Taiwan. Of course, the other one that is supposed to be Taiwanese, also has a Mandarin pronunciation. And, the A is an approximation of a Taiwanese sound. I think part of the confusion comes from people linking Mandarin specifically with Chinese writing, as if they are one and the same. However, you could take all the writing away, and substitute pinyin or any other writing system, or none at all, and you would still have Mandarin. Just like you can pronounce Chinese characters many different ways.
August 16th, 2006 at 7:05 pm
To further illustrate the point of my previous comment, here’s a page which contains an audio file of the song “Wandering to Tamshui.” Note the use of the character “阮” in place of “我.” It’s a contextual indication that the text should be read using Taiwanese pronunciation and not Mandarin.
August 16th, 2006 at 7:15 pm
the taiwanese romanize “淡” as “tam”? WTF!!?
August 17th, 2006 at 1:05 am
Misspellings are pretty rampant in Taiwan, but look on the bright side. It’s getting better! In Taibei city, especially, most of the romanizations are right. With the name “Taibei” (台北) itself being a notable exception, pretty much all of the MRT stops are either spelled correctly, or translated into English… and that includes “Danshui” (淡水). As for “Taibei” still being spelled as “Taipei”, just look how long it took before people started regularly writing 北京 as “Beijing” instead of “Peking”. It’s kind of ingrained and it won’t be updated until long after everything else has.
December 19th, 2006 at 1:07 pm
[...] And there is this older post about “A菜“ or “the ‘A’ vegetable” over at Doubting to Shuo, where it is generally agreed that it is of Hoklo (Taiwanese) origin. [...]