Chaos Clouds

One of my favourite foods is 餛飩 húndùn “wonton”, a kind of Chinese dumplings found in soup, either alone as 餛飩湯 húndùn tāng (湯 tāng “soup”) or with noodles as 餛飩麵 húndùn miàn (麵 miàn “noodles”).

Aside from the tastiness (and the nostalgia, since it’s a dish from my childhood), a major reason I love 餛飩 so much is because of the word itself (because, hello, word nerd! *waves* ^_^). Witness:

餛飩 húndùn is related in both form and phonetics to 混沌 hùndùn “chaos”. Notice the right side of each of the two characters in both words. They’re identical: 昆 kūn (or hùn) + 屯 tún.

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A nerdy — but short! — digression into some linguistic weeds:

Let’s ignore the tones for a sec, since they can change depending on all sorts of rules — tone sandhi isn’t a patch of linguistic weeds so much as a plot of linguistic jungle that eats unwary travelers for breakfast (XD) —, and just look at the phonemes for a bit.

As you can hopefully see, dun is a close phonetic cousin to tun. If you happen to know anything about linguistics, you may remember that they’re the same in manner and place of articulation and differ only in voicing: /t/ is voiceless; /d/ is voiced.

No surprise, then, that 飩 dùn and 沌 dùn can arise from 屯 tún.

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Words in Chinese† are often phonosemantic — meaning, they contain both phonetic and semantic information —, with the semantic part often on the left and the phonetic part often on the right.

(This is why, by the way, I didn’t bother mentioning the meanings of 昆 kūn or 屯 tún — “elder brother”/”descendants” and “(to) station (soldiers)”/”village”, respectively — because neither 餛飩 nor 混沌 has anything to do with elderly brother descendants stationing in villages. [Unless you want to get really creative. XD] 昆 kūn and 屯 tún in these characters are there for their sounds, not their senses.)

That means, with 混沌 “chaos”, we have swirls of water (氵 is a component form of 水 shuǐ “water”) making clouds of chaos, plus the sounds hùn + dùn from 昆 hùn and 屯 tún. With 餛飩 “wonton”, we have the foody goodness of, well, food XD (飠is a component form of 食 shí “food” or “[to] eat”) making tiny clouds in soup, plus the sounds hún + dùn from the same components.

Why do I keep saying “clouds”? Where do clouds come into this?

Well, to start, there’s the clear connection between water and clouds (clouds being amorphous lumps of water vapour and all that) and also between chaos and clouds (disorderly swirliness and all that).

But clouds are also in the very “foodiness”, as it were, of 餛飩. You see, the word “wonton” came into English† via Cantonese’s wàntān, which itself is written 雲吞 (yúntūn in Mandarin). 雲 yún means “cloud”, and 吞 tūn means “(to) swallow”. In other words, you’re “swallowing clouds”. And that’s because 雲吞, or 餛飩, in soup do in fact look like clouds! The skins cling to the lumpiness of the meat, creating those cute little bumps that cumulous clouds are known for. The skins also ripple out away from each meat lump, in the way that clouds can streak across the sky.

So why is it that we call them 餛飩 húndùn “wonton” rather than 雲吞 yúntūn “cloud swallows”?

Well, actually, in some places, they are called 雲吞. ‘^^ (Though, to be fair, I’ve never heard them called “cloud swallows” in English. . . . Probably because they don’t look like cloudy birds. XD)

But if what you’re asking is why do we call them 餛飩 húndùn “wonton” at all . . . ?

That, I’m afraid, is a feature of the easygoing nature of wandering words. Words will hitch a ride with any ol’ language; they don’t care. Words will hitch a ride with any ol’ language; they don’t care. You see, while the word “wonton” took the Cantonese wàntān boat to English, the word 餛飩 apparently took the Shanghainese 餛飩 hhun den one to Mandarin (according to Wikipedia, anyway).

Isn’t language fun? XD

Anyways, this entire post is really all just a very long way of saying . . .

By eating 餛飩, you are swallowing Chinese chaos clouds of dumpling delight! XDDD

†By “Chinese”, I mean primarily Taiwanese Mandarin (primarily in Taipei), and by “English”, I mean primarily American English (primarily in the Mid-Atlantic region) — for the sole reason that that is the Chinese and English, respectively, I am most familiar with. And while I don’t wish to erase other Chineses and Englishes out there in the world, it’s hard to use more precise linguistic terminology without being utterly distracting (not to mention further exacerbating my no doubt already insufferable prolixity XD). After all, I’m not truly delving into and deconstructing all the linguistic variations of Chinese & English here so much as trying to write a couple of cute little blog posts about some cute little food. =P