Mongolian food word-loans

When eating at Mongolian restaurants, the appetizers can be confusing to a Chinese-speaker because the food names are incorrectly borrowed.

The word buuz (Mongolian dumpling), is borrowed from Chinese baozi, which is a meat bun. The Mongolian word for baozi is makh mantuu, which is borrowed from the Chinese mantou - which is a steamed white bun with no meat in it. Then the Mongolians have the regular mantuu, which actually does correspond to the Chinese mantou. Sounds confusing? I made a chart below to explain.



This is because prior to the Song Dynasty in China, mantou was used to describe both filled and unfilled buns, and other cultures borrowed the word before that. The Mongolians probably took up the word baozi as dumpling after they conquered the Song Dynasty in the 1200s. To make matters even more complicated, in Korean, mandu is acually a dumpling.

As a non-agricultural country, most of the words for vegetables are also borrowed from Chinese - Green peppers are chinjuu in Mongolian and chinjiao in Chinese. Carrots - lovan and luobo. Onions - songon and tsong.

On a side note, (well, because Kyushu Japanese people eat horses, so it's appropriate to include this here) the Chinese word for horse is ma, and is probably borrowed from the Mongolian muur, becuase the nomads had horses first. Then the Japanese borrowed it from Chinese, and they call horses uma.