This past month the North American sky has been criss-crossed by flocks of migrating birds in V- or I-formations, most of them Canada geese flying south. A flock of resting geese is shown in the picture below:
Whenever I watched them flying into the sunset, niuc's beautiful poem, which we discussed in another posting, came to mind. The geese also remind me that there is a pattern of sound correspondence (PSC) between European and Taiwanese/Hokien words, that is, the word-final -s in European words is absent in Tw/Hk corresponding words.
The Canada goose is called Kanadagans in German, where Kanada = Canada and gans = goose. In Tw/Hk the migratory geese are called gān 雁. So, we can formulate a relationship between the two words:
German gans : Tw/Hk gān 雁
Obviously, the relationship between the two is the loss of the word-final -s from German to Tw/Hk. The German word gans can trace back to Old High German (OHG) gans. Its cognate words in Old Norse (ON) gás and Old English (OE) gōs are also correlated with Tw/Hk words by the same PSC, as summarized below:
OHG gans 'goose' : Tw/Hk gān 雁
ON gás 'goose' : Tw/Hk giâ 鵝
OE gōs 'goose' : Tw/Hk gô 鵝
Here the Tw/Hk gān 雁 is 'wild goose' and giâ, gô 鵝 'domesticated goose', both are geese. In Tw/Hk giâ, when compared with ON gás, an -i- is inserted (infixed) to serve as a glide.
There are more examples for PSC-2. I will present 4 simple examples that do not involve other sound changes (thus do not require lengthy explanations).
ON hús 'house' : Tw/Hk hú 府
OHG lahs 'salmon' : Tw/Hk láh 鱲 (as in ka-láh hî 嘉鱲魚, the fish that tastes like salmon)
Latin pus 'pus' : Tw/Hk pū (Group-1 word) as in pū-lâng (化膿)
Latin rōs 'dew' : Tw/Hk lò∙ 露
We have discussed the relationship between salmon and ka-láh hî 嘉鱲魚 'red seabream' in another thread.
Regarding ON hús : Tw/Hk hú 府, in Danish, Swedish and Norwegian, hus means 'house' and just an ordinary house. The following picture (taken by Mr. Larry Wu) of Skagen Hus is a gift shop in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, selling gifts from Scandinavia; Skagen refers to a town located at the northern tip of Denmark. As you can see, this is just an ordinary house.
In contrast, Tw/Hk hú 府, as I have explained in another posting, is a very polite term for 'house' such as in hú-siōng 府上 or kùi-hú 貴府 'thy house'. The restaurant in which a wedding banquet is being held will put out a poster in red characters at the main entrance announcing, say, Chiu Tân Hú kiat-hun hí-iàn 周陳府結婚喜宴 'The Wedding Banquet of the Houses of Chou and Chen'. Chóng-Thóng Hú 總統府 is the Presidential House, a house of the highest prestige. This suggests to us that once an ordinary European word entered Asia, it might become a prestige word. This is similar to the borrowing of Norman French lexicon into English following the Norman Conquest of 1066, which elevated the conquerors' French to a language of prestige in England.
Heruler