You are currently viewing Srivijaya 15: Sanfoqi in Hokkien

Srivijaya 15: Sanfoqi in Hokkien

In an earlier post, I discussed how one of the Chinse terms that historians claim indicated a kingdom called “Srivijaya” was actually referring to “Cambodia.”

The term in question is “Sanfoqi” 三佛齊, and I pointed out that when we look up the pronunciations of these characters in a work like Edwin G. Pulleyblank’s Lexicon of Reconstructed Pronunciation: In Early Middle Chinese, Late Middle Chinese and Early Mandarin, we get something like “Samfhutshiaj,” which is very close to a Chinese name that we know referred to “Cambodia”: Jianpusai 柬埔寨.

“Jianpusai” is how this term is pronounced in modern Mandarin. In the Song-Ming period, again following Pulleyblank, it might have sounded something like “Kyampusek” or “Kyampusaj.”

“Samfhutshiaj” 三佛齊 and “Kyampusaj” 柬埔寨 are clearly close in sound. However, while they resemble the name “Cambodia,” they don’t sound exactly like that term.

Some people have told me that such terms probably would have entered “Chinese” through people who spoke a language like Hokkien, as it was people from the southeastern coastal regions of the Chinese world who worked as merchants and visited places in Southeast Asia.

I’m always reluctant to use modern pronunciations to make claims about the past (and I’m unaware of any historical reconstructions of Hokkien – please let me know if they exist), but just for the heck of it, I decided to see what “Sanfoqi” and “Jianpusai” would sound like following modern Hokkien pronunciation.

The Ministry of Education in Taiwan has an online dictionary that provides Hokkien pronunciations of characters. It transcribes those pronunciations using a couple of systems that are used in Taiwan: Zhuyin fuhao (Bo Po Mo Fo), and a style of Romanization that is more like the Wade-Giles transcription than the Pinyin used in mainland China.
To convert between the two, “p” in the Taiwan system = “b” in Pinyin; “tse” = “ze”; “k” = “g”).
When we check, we see that in Hokkien, “Sanfoqi” becomes “Sam-put-tse” (or “Sam-but-ze”) and “Jianpusai” becomes “Kan-poo-tse” (or “Gan-bo-ze”).

Again, I don’t like to use modern pronunciations to examine the past, but from this quick check of modern Hokkien pronunciations, and understanding that there are variations in Hokkien pronunciation from one area to another and that certain pronunciations must have changed to some extent over time I have absolutely no difficulty in seeing “Cambodia” in “Sambutze” (Sanfoqi).

In other words, if some people argue that we need to look at the past from a Hokkien perspective, then this little experiment here suggests that such a perspective would only strengthen my argument about Sanfoqi/Srivijaya.

This Post Has One Comment

  1. Anh Tran

    Hokkien is relatively more phonemically conservative than Standard Mandarin, so it’s a good guess nonetheless.

Leave a Reply