Etymon #18
Lost its fish
Borrowed from Chinese, this word entered English in 1682, when British traders in southeast Asia encountered a new kind of condiment.
The word travelled into English from a southern Chinese dialect, spoken by the seamen of Fujian province. Indonesian and Malay speakers adopted the word locally before it entered English. The Chinese form was a compound of two elements.
The two elements of the Hokkien compound had specific meanings. The first meant 'pickled seafood'. The second meant 'juice', or 'brine'. Together they named a brine of pickled fish.
Among the words that entered English from the seventeenth-century East Asia trade, TEA, from the same Hokkien region of Fujian, came into English in 1655. SOY, the dark fermented sauce of Japan and China, followed in 1696. All three reached English through the same maritime route.
The original condiment was a fermented fish brine, eaten across the Chinese coast and the trading ports of southeast Asia. British traders brought it home, where eighteenth-century English cooks made their own versions using whatever ingredients lay to hand: mushrooms, walnuts, anchovies, oysters. William Kitchiner's Apicius Redivivus, published in London in 1817, devoted seven pages to recipes. The American version emerged in the early nineteenth century and gradually displaced all others. By 1921, the word became synonymous with this version alone.
