Taiwan Place Names Explained

Having blogged samples of my books on English place names and also examined the etymologies of the nations of the world and their respective capitals I thought it time I cast my net a little wider. As English place names share some links to other tongues it would be interesting to see if any of the elements contributing to our place names could be found elsewhere. Continuing an alphabetical tour of the world and a look at the largest of Taiwan's cities.

Taipei City and New Taipei City is a form of the original T'ai-pei or 'north of Taiwan'.

Kaohsiung is thought to come from the early Siraya language and means 'bamboo forest'.

Miaoli takes two Hakka Chinese words meu 'cat' and li 'raccoon dog'.

Taitung simply tells us it can be found in 'eastern Taiwan'.

Penghu used to be called Ilhas dos Pescadores or 'fishermen islands'.

Kinmen comes from the Chines for 'golden gate'.

Keelung is from the Chinese from 'rooster cage'.

Note the spellings of the places are English as the piece is written in English.

Do You Speak Reindeer?

It's that time of year when certain individuals get to don a certain suit of red. One of the delights of such is hearing what the little ones want for Christmas and having no idea what it is. Requests from more mature individuals have included a blonde of 18 and a Land Rover. Why she wanted an inexperienced driver for such a car when surely half the pleasure is in driving it, I have no idea.

As always I was stumped by one question. A young chap asking "What language does the reindeer speak?" I told him "reindeer" and moved the conversation quickly on. But it did get me thinking as to what animals are heard to sound like in other languages. A quick search failed to reveal anything about speaking reindeer, but I did find this fascinating list of dogs barking, ducks quacking and frogs croaking in other languages.

These alternative sounds can be found here'