The Chinese Names for Sydney
Sydney Opera House at Circular Quay in Sydney. Source: AAP Image/Steven Saphore.
For some years now, I have been collecting and studying the original Chinese names for various overseas places, especially in Australasia, North America, and Southeast Asia. This is of course necessary to support my work in the field of historical translation, but it is often also interesting, because a name may point to a particular Chinese language, or reference a former English name, or a local landmark, and thus preserve something of the history of Chinese contact, or the history of a place in general, something which may not be generally known.
SBS Cantonese has just published an article about the two Chinese names for Sydney, their history, origins and usage. This was a great initiative and the article is well worth reading; it can be viewed here: https://www.sbs.com.au/chinese/cantonese/zh-hant/two-translations-of-sydney I am quoted at quite a few points, further to questions I responded to one of the writers on in the lead up to publication. One’s full meaning is of course rarely ever represented entirely as one would have wished in such contexts, which are hardly conducive to dilation on the subject of historical linguistics, but the gist is there.
There is one observation I made on the subject of the formerly ubiquitous Chinese Australian name for Sydney (雪梨) that didn’t make it into the final article. That name for Sydney, which I suspect was pronounced *sit55 li:22 in one or other dialect of the See Yip language (四邑話), is also the See Yip and Cantonese name for the Tientsin pear. The Tientsin pear is an appealing variety of juicy, crunchy pear that lots of records from the period confirm was not unfamiliar to people in Kwangtung in the nineteenth century, it being brought in especially from northern China to satisfy local demand. It thus seemed likely to me that, to those speakers of one or other variety of the See Yip language who coined the name (probably in the gold-rush era), the English word “Sydney“ sounded uncannily like the name of this type of pear.
One aspect of the Chinese place-name story that the writers of this SBS article were unable to find an answer to, and which I do not know the answer to either, was why so many well-established Chinese names for places around the world were officially replaced within the People’s Republic of China, while certain others were preserved. This of course goes to goings-on in a more modern historical period than my work is generally concerned with, but it is curious that names such as those for New York and Vancouver, which appear to have been coined early on by speakers of the See Yip language, were preserved, while the names used historically in Australia for all or almost all places, including the large cities of Sydney and Melbourne, were effectively erased. One wonders whether this might simply have been a result of a lack of resources, and links with the outside world, on the part of those responsible. I and others would be most interested to hear from anyone who is able to shed light on this question.