Farang And China

[DavidHouston]

(I would have posted this under the ongoing discussion but was unable to find this discussion)

"Tai Peng Wang kindly provided Chinese descriptions of papal envoys. The ambassador who reached Florence in 1434 was by no means the first. According to Yu Lizi, Yuan China called the Papal States "the country of Farang" and the Papal States as a whole "Fulin" or "Farang." The official Ming history states that diplomatic exchanges between the Papal States and Ming China began as early as 1371, when Hong Wu, Zhu Di's fathere, assigned a foreigner from Fulin or Farang called Nei Kulan (Nicholas?) as teh Chinese ambassador to the Papal States to inform the pope of the dynastic change in China. Later on, Hong Wu appointed a delegation led by Pula (Paul?), who brought gifts and tribute to Farang."

"1434 The Year a Magnifent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance", Gavin Menzies, Harper, 2008, pages 132-133.

Note the use of the name/word Farang well before the advent of the French, British, or American empires.

[Rikker]

That's still relatively late, but it supports the generally accepted theory that the term was spread across Asia quite early on by Persian traders, and originally comes from the Farsi or Arabic pronunciation of Frank or Francia, the Germanic empire of the last first millennium. That would be why likely cognates are found in so many languages between the Middle East and the Far East.

[RickBradford]

For perhaps the wrong reasons, ฝรั่ง still grates on my ear.

I'd much rather hear บักสีดา, it has the benefit of some humour and lateral thinking to it.

[smint]

In some Asian languages and dialect as I see it:

Farang

法 = read as 'fa' ; french (法国人) - Mandarin Chinese

rang/lang = person - Teochew dialect (spoken by many Chinese in Thailand)

In many ways, perhaps many Asian languages are similar... and then it evolved to become farang...

Maybe, just maybe...

Edited November 25, 2009 by smint

[sbk]

Southerners shorten farang to rang -- like most everything else for that matter

[Harcourt]

I once mentioned the word "farang" to my friend, a Gujurati (India). His reaction was, "Oh, Thailand uses "farang" for white men too."

Or maybe he used "ferengi".... a "likely cognate", if that's what Rikker meant.

[Rikker]

Please see these discussions, dating back to 1993:

http://linguistlist.org/issues/4/4-459.html

http://linguistlist.org/issues/4/4-573.html#2

http://linguistlist.org/issues/4/4-492.html

http://linguistlist.org/issues/4/4-558.html

[Harcourt]

Please see these discussions, dating back to 1993:

http://linguistlist.org/issues/4/4-459.html

http://linguistlist.org/issues/4/4-573.html#2

http://linguistlist.org/issues/4/4-492.html

http://linguistlist.org/issues/4/4-558.html

Fascinating!

I'm a Polynesian speaker and the penny has only just dropped; Fijian "valangi" and Polynesian "palangi"

are, in MHO, too simmilar to "falang" and "farangi" to be coincidence.

Genetically, the polynesians are descendants of Taiwan....I wonder if the connection goes that far back to before the Pacific diaspora, and if so, then the quoted Persian connection to Thailand in the 16th century (and before that the 11th/12th centuries connection to Franks and the crusades) may not be the actual origin.

Fascinating!!!!!