Nonya

[khiemtran]

So, lunchtime in Chinatown, and we're trying out a new Malaysian restaurant, Nonya.


Nonya advertises itself as "The Taste of Home" and, sure enough, the flavours were authentic, even if our waiter was baffled by HL's request for a teh oh (black tea with sugar). At least the clientele seemed to be largely Malaysian or Singaporean.

Here's the seafood hor fun, which was excellent, and definitely worth a repeat visit.



While Liem loved his fried rice...



And I had my nasi lemak, my standard yardstick for gauging a Malaysian restaurant. This one was pretty good. The curry had the "correct" flavour, although I prefer the chicken on the bone, and the coconut rice was super-rich.



Now to the name... The word nonya or nyonya refers to the women of the Straits Chinese, the descendants of Chinese immigrants who came to what is now Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore as early as the fifteenth century. The males are known as babas and collectively they are known as Baba-Nyonya or Peranakans.

So, if you see a restaurant named Nonya or Nyonya, it's a good bet it will feature the cuisine that evolved in Malaysia and Indonesia when these Chinese settlers married in with the local populations and Chinese cooking similarly met Malay and Indonesian species and ingredients.

You can see the Chinese spelling for Nonya on the right of this sign...



The first character, 娘, consists of 女 (woman) + 良 (virtuous). It can be read as "mother", "young girl", "woman" or "wife".

So far, so good, right?

The second one, 惹, featuring the radical for heart (心) means to irritate, vex, incite or invite trouble.

Okay, so "Irritating woman"? "Inciting woman"? What's going on here?



The trick here is that nonya isn't actually a Chinese word. I'm guessing (hoping) here that 娘惹 was just the best phonetic approximation they could find (albeit a somewhat unflattering one).

In Chinese, when foreign words are imported, they usually end up given characters which come close to the original sound and hopefully don't have too inappropriate a meaning. (I'm still not sure why they ended up with such a negative second character, unless there's some other meaning or reference here I'm missing...)

In Mandarin, the characters would be pronounced niangrě, and in Cantonese it would be a bit closer to the original, although still not the same. Maybe there was a reading that sounded a bit closer to Nyonya when the name was coined (although interestingly, in Hokkien, the largest ethnic group among the Baba-Nyonya, the reading is even further out: niulia).

So, where does nonya come from? Well, there are lots of theories. The two most likely seem to be that either it comes from the Portuguese word for Grandmother (evolving into a generic term of respect for a female foreigner in Malay and Indonesian) or from an Indonesian kinship term that specifically refers to the spouse of a son.

The babas meanwhile, get their name spelled with a character meaning "cave", 峇. This is normally pronounced "ke", but it has an alternative reading of "ba", and it was also once used in the name for Bali. It's also interesting because it's made up of mountain (山), person (人) and mouth (口). There's a Chinese word baba meaning father, but it's spelled quite differently in Chinese, and it appears this one is another loanword, originating either from Persian or from one of the Indian languages, or again from an Indonesian kinship term (this time for the spouse of a daughter).

Here's an example I saw while in Xiamen (in this case identifying a Singaporean/Indonesian restaurant...)

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

This is what I **love** about insular SE Asia--all these different cultures bumping up against each other and blending and changing. I love how different the characters sound depending on which Chinese language it is that you're saying them in. I bet you're right that they were used as phonetics.

The thing of the pronunciation changing depending on whether it's Mandarin, Cantonese, or Hokkien (can we use that as an adjective?) reminds me of how the Japanese version of the "Chinese" (on) reading of the character 明 can be read both "mei" and "min"--I think (IIRC) that they think that's based on the different times the words came over, "mei" from Tang period and "min" from Ming.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Interesting! I didn't know that, thanks! And I didn't know about the Kan'on andTō'on readings until I googled just now. I was about to say that with all the on and kun readings, kanji are almost as hard to pronounce as English, but I guess it's just another sign of all the complexity people can deal with as they evolve their language.

[mnfaure.livejournal.com]

Is it the writer geek in me that is eager to go back to working on my invented language for my current WIP after reading this post? But only after grabbing a plate of hor fun. None of that on hand, so I guess a cinnamon roll, which I need to go pop in the oven, will have to do.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

You have an invented language? Cool! Do you have any examples? Hope the roll gave you sufficient inspiration!

[mnfaure.livejournal.com]

Argh. Lost the last comment I made to this.

I do indeed have an invented language, two of them to be exact for two different countries in the trilogy I'm writing. here is a blog post I made about it (years ago!!!! Where has the time gone, and when will I finish this thing!?!?):

http://mnfaure.livejournal.com/133606.html

As I mention in that post, making the language is fun, but the best part about it was the story ideas garnered by the exercise.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Thanks! That's very interesting. I'll thrown in invented words for my stories, and I'll have an idea or two about how different registers might be used (which was actually a plot point in one story, where a hilltribe boy learns a lowlands lands language from the daughter of an aristocrat - and picks up her accent), but I've never gone any further than that before.

[mnfaure.livejournal.com]

I used to try to find words to "tweak" from other languages, but invention is the best, I think, especially if you think about *why* that group of letters, why that signification, etc.

I can imagine interesting things for your hilltribe boy, speaking with a posh accent. :P