Talk:Chi-lung

19th Century Use
Based on my preliminary searches, use of the English loan word Chi-lung to refer to Keelung in the 19th century was rare. In geography related to Chinese languages as I suspect is also the case in other areas, some English loan words can be artificially generated systematically via another language but then see little to no use for decades followed by a change in fortune later on. With relation to words like Kinmen and Yunlin, there are gaps of decades when those words apparently only saw usage in lists or rare situations. However, that does not change the etymology of any of those words with respect to determining the origin of the word. The origin of the word was just that: the origin. Policy shifts of a later age are part of history but they are not a part of the origin of the English language loan word. As long as the word is "the same word" referring to "the same thing", then the origin of the word never changed over that period.

As of today, the following excerpt appears as entry number 621 in the upper-middle part of the right-hand column on page 32 of The Cities and Towns of China: A Geographical Dictionary by G. M. H. Playfair, agent of the Consular Service of the United Kingdom in China, which was published in 1879 in Hongkong through Noronha & Co. (as generously provided by ):

"雞 {...} 621 Chi-lung | 籠 Kelung (or, Kee- lung,) one of the open ports in the North of Formosa, Lat. 25° 11', Long. 121° 44'."

In writing his dictionary, Playfair reports that Thomas Wade's system of romanization was employed. The Wade system is colloquially mixed in together with the concept of Wade-Giles by the benighted souls living in the early 21st century. That is to say: to create factually accurate and true etymologies for these words, we must accept whole-heartedly that every word found in this tome is explicitly not derived from "Wade-Giles", but is instead derived from an antecedent system- Thomas Wade's system- and that fact must in course of time be used to refine with more precision the etymologies of "Wade-Giles" derived terms documented throughout Wiktionary.

Returning to Chi-lung, on page three of Report by Mr. Hosie on the Island of Formosa with Special Reference to its Resources and Trade by (published August 1893), we see:

North. Tai-pei Fu:- {...} Chi-lung (Kelung) T'ing.

Later the word is used in modern publications:

In 1875, the Ching Empire selected the characters 基隆 to be a homophone in Mandarin Chinese with 雞籠. We know that in 1879, Playfair, a British consular officer, was explictly deriving 'Chi-lung' from the Mandarin for the Chinese character name 雞籠. It seems possible that period works in academia or diplomacy would have used the naming 'Chi-lung', though we have no Wiktionary-grade citations of Chi-lung from that period (yet). On the basis presented here, I default with what we can see with our eyes here: that the word 'Chi-lung' apparently originates with 雞籠, and that the fact that 基隆 was already in use in 1879 as a substitute homophonous Chinese character name is not pertinent to the question of where the word 'Chi-lung' "came from" since Playfair is making it explicit where the word came from in his dictionary. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 17:57, 24 February 2021 (UTC)