Talk:singkak

Source

@Mlgc1998 Hey, could you source this etymology? Thanks. --Mar vin kaiser (talk) 07:28, 27 February 2022 (UTC)

@Mlgc1998: Thanks! By the way, where did the characters "身殼" come from? --Mar vin kaiser (talk) 14:00, 27 February 2022 (UTC)

@Mar vin kaiser It's from Chan-Yap (1980), she put at page 131:

singkak

sîn+k^hàk 'medicine with bitter taste for diarrhoea'; (sîn 身 'body', k^hàk 殼 'husk, shell' )

siŋkák 'drug of bitter taste, for diarrhoea, indigestion, etc.'

Upon checking through my resouces, the tone for 身(sin) - 陰平 doesn't match the "sîn 身" - 陽平 that she recorded which is supposed to be tone letter: ˥ according to her table at page 29. I browsed through the paper and she mentioned in her methodology as one of the basis of the paper "intuition of the investigator as a native speaker of Hokkien Chinese" (Page 5: 1.4.1) and that the Hokkien her informants (including herself) are using is the "Amoy dialect" (Page 10:No.7). If by "Amoy", she specifically is referring to the Xiamen dialect and not Hokkien in general, I'm somewhat doubtful on her saying that her own is also of the Xiamen dialect, or at least not fully, because some of the thinking she demonstrates comes from a Quanzhou dialectal perspective, tho in this sense, the old thinking of "Amoy" generally referring to Hokkien in general comes into play. From this (and also remembering some people we know in the groupchat we're in with mostly Xiamen background), I understood how she got it confused. The Hokkien dictionary references she cited (Douglas and Barclay 's Amoy Dictionary and Supplement (1899, 1923)) mostly doesn't give corresponding Chinese characters to the terms, besides in romanized form, so most of the chinese characters she had to write had to mostly rely on the above intuition she mentioned. From a Quanzhou-based Hokkien perspective, it makes sense to first think of "sin" = 身, and "khak" = 殼, because of the existing still commonly spoken terms such as 身軀(sin-khu) and 頭殼(thâu-khak), but from an Amoy-based Hokkien perspective, this might not be true as a common tendency of thinking (just like our friend in chat with mostly Xiamen background). The supposed common thinking instead from a Xiamen dialectal perspective would've went for 神(sîn). I tested this thinking by further checking in sources like 闽南方言大词典 and through ChhoeTaigi if 神(sîn) will come up a matching meaning, and true enough, at page 356 of 闽南方言大词典, it says on the lower left column:

【神曲】《厦漳》sin^2-6khak⁷《泉》sin^2-4khak⁷

泉州制造的一种药茶，能治疗痢疾、腹泻、

中暑、食积等疾病。历史悠久，闻名遐迩。

有 “百草神曲” 和 “茶饼神曲” 等。

And then, checking this "神曲" here in Wiktionary pointed to 神麴, which further checking in ChhoeTaigi came up a result at (1932) 台日大辭典(台譯版), which ChhoeTaigi's interpretation of the definition is "(藥)成藥ê名，煎服治感冒。", which comes from the page 719 itself using the Kyujitai form saying vertically on the 3rd row middle:

シ̌ヌ カ́ク 𥙍麯。（薬）賣薬の名。(煎服して感冒を治す

The Taiwanese kana can be interpreted from here. Mlgc1998 (talk) 14:20, 27 February 2022 (UTC)

@Mlgc1998: Yep, I was suspecting it was an attempt to provide characters for the word. I don't think it should be here though, since it's just a guess from Chan-Yap. Anyway, 神麴 is enough. --Mar vin kaiser (talk) 22:00, 27 February 2022 (UTC)