Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2016 March 11

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March 11

Is Worcestershire sauce ever called Catsup in English?

Worcestershire sauce is called "gip3 jap1" in Cantonese. Of the two characters used (喼汁) to write this name, the first has no other meaning while the second means juice or sauce, suggesting that the name is specifically created to record an existing name - either foreign or colloquial. A newspaper article cited by Chinese Wikipedia claims that the "gip jap" name is a transliteration of English "Catsup", apparently because the British who introduced it to Hong Kong often called it that. If true, that would be quite interesting because "catsup" supposedly derives from a different Chinese word that means "pickled fish sauce". My question is: is/was Worcestershire sauce ever called "catsup" [in English, especially by British people], either now or in the 19th century? Or is the derivation more complicated than this (e.g. perhaps "gip jap" does derive from "catsup" but "catsup" only ever meant "tomato ketchup" and the borrowing to refer to Worcestershire sauce occurred amongst Chinese speakers in Hong Kong rather than English speakers...) --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 15:52, 11 March 2016 (UTC) I have edited the question to make it clearer that I am interested particularly in British usage in English, in case this was not clear. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 16:42, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Wiktionary https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ketchup gives Malay kicap as an intermediate step from 鮭汁, and relates it to Indonesian ketjap meaning soy sauce. It also says "at one time it was a more general term for sauce, and it is still occasionally used in this way, as with grape ketchup and mushroom ketchup." It further points out that *catsup* was a popular word prior to Heinz Tomato Ketchup being released in 1876. This Slate article has a recipe containing beer, anchovies, mace, cloves, pepper, ginger, shallots, and mushrooms. That's not exactly the recipe for worcestershire sauce (needs more molasses and tamarind, and fewer mushrooms) but it's close. So yeah, it's completely reasonable to speculate that the word did a rapid circular tour of East Asia and got re-transliterated.

Extra: today I asked two Chinese friends about the word for worcestershire sauce. Only one of them knew what worcestershire sauce was, and neither knew how to translate it. I have to wonder if the translation is based on an idea along the lines of "all western sauces are probably ketchup", held by the Chinese rather than the British.  Card Zero  (talk) 11:27, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

I suspect that Lea & Perrins was better known in the Crown Colony than elsewhere in China, but that's just a guess. Alansplodge (talk) 08:55, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Card_Zero: the last thing you mentioned was my suspicion (at least in 1850, when the sauce was new to Hong Kong), hence the question as to whether any Brits (now or in the past) ever actually called Worcester sauce Catsup.

Alansplodge: in my experience Worcestershire sauce is only a "thing" for people in Hong Kong and Shanghai - it is used extensively in both "Western" and local cuisine in both places. In Hong Kong it is called "gip jap" (as noted), and in Shanghai it is called "la jiang you", literally "spicy fermented [soy] sauce". Other than in those places and perhaps a few people in Taiwan, very few Chinese people are likely to even know what it is. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 10:37, 14 March 2016 (UTC)