Qq meaning how to#
Since I've never been able to determine a cognate for this "Q" in other Sinitic languages than Taiwanese and no one has ever been able to tell me how to write this Q morpheme with a Chinese character, I have sometimes wondered whether it might not have come from English "chewy" itself. Thus Q is clearly well established in Taiwanese as meaning "chewy," and it has been picked up on the Mainland with the same meaning (especially in advertisements). This Taiwanese "Q" meaning "chewy" can be intensified by doubling, hence "QQ糖" ("chewy-chewy candy" or "really chewy candy"), nougats that are also styled "mini-Q." So I guess we could think of these "Ah Q" noodles as something like "Uncle Chewy" noodles, i.e., when prepared they are al dente. For example, the former president of Taiwan, Chen Shui-bian was often referred to as Ah-bian. Taiwanese are particularly fond of prefixing the second syllable of a person's given name with "Ah" 阿 to express a feeling of closeness.
To return to the problem of Q, however, here's a picture of a package of noodles with the brand name "Ah Q" (阿Q): In Japanese mochi would be written with the 餅 kanji, but in Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM) that would be pronounced bǐng and would mean "round flatcake." Neither 米+麻 nor 糜, however, can compete in frequency with má 麻 ("hemp") for writing the first syllable of the Taiwanese rendition of mochi, since Googling yields 35 matches for "糜糬" versus over seven million for "麻糬." This is clearly one of the countless cases where the sound of a character trumps its meaning. This extremely rare character is not even in Unicode (unless it has been added very recently), though it is probably a variant of mí or méi 糜, with the "rice" radical at the bottom instead of on the side, while the second character is shǔ 糬, which might be cognate with shǔ 薯 ("sweet potato").
In fact, the first character is so infrequent that I have had to write it in the ad hoc fashion 米+麻. I told Anne that ruǎn Q means "soft and chewy," where the Q (pronounced kiu) is a common Taiwanese morpheme that no one seems to know how to write in Chinese characters.Īnother challenge posed by the package is that the characters used to write the Taiwanese equivalent of mochi, 米+麻 and 糬, are both exceedingly rare, neither of them appearing in Hanyu da zidian (Unabridged Dictionary of Chinese Characters it has 54,678 entries) or other large dictionaries of Chinese characters.
Anne was puzzled by the expression ruǎn Q (軟Q) that occurs on a package of "Japanese style" cakes ( mochi) made in Taiwan: The title is from the subject line of a message sent to me a few days ago by Anne Henochowicz.