What do you call that round thing in your kitchen that you cook soup in?

Mandarin calls it guo (鍋). Taiwanese Minnanese calls it ding (鼎).

I used to think ding was just a local word — like “dumpling” vs “gyoza.” Regional. Cute. Nothing special.

Then I read the Revised Taiwan Provincial Chronicles: Linguistic Chronicles. And I discovered something that stopped me cold.

That ding we say in Taiwanese? It’s the exact same word Sima Qian used in the Records of the Grand Historian — 2,000 years ago. He used it 229 times.

Two hundred and twenty-nine times.

Meanwhile, the word guo that Mandarin speakers use for pot? It appears exactly zero times in the main text of the Shiji.

229 vs. 0.

I stared at that number for a solid minute. You probably are too, right now.

I. 229 vs 21 vs 3 vs 0: A Set of Numbers That Breaks Your Brain

Let me lay out the data.

In the Shiji, the words related to “cooking vessels” appear with these frequencies:

  • Ding (鼎): 229 times
  • Fu (釜): 21 times
  • Huo (鑊): 3 times
  • Guo (鍋): 0 times (only appears in later commentaries)

229 to 0.

A history book from 2,000 years ago uses the exact same word that a grandmother at a Taiwanese wet market uses today.

Ask any linguist what this means, and they’ll tell you: the colloquial layer of Minnanese can be traced back to the “Western and Eastern Han transition” — around the first century CE.

In other words, next time you say ding in a Taiwanese kitchen, the sound coming out of your mouth is something Sima Qian would have understood.

A Tang dynasty person? A Song dynasty person? A Ming dynasty person? They might not have — because they’d long stopped saying ding.

II. One Character, Two Pronunciations: A Hidden Migration Record

Vocabulary is one thing. Pronunciation is even more revealing.

In Minnanese, the same character often has multiple readings. This isn’t “inconsistency.” It’s a historical timeline.

Take the character hang (行):

  • kiānn: to walk. The colloquial reading, used in everyday speech.
  • hìng: behavior, conduct. The literary reading, used by educated people.

You think this is just “spoken vs written language”? Wrong.

The gap between these two pronunciations encodes a centuries-long mass migration.

The colloquial kiānn comes from an older Han dynasty sound system. The literary hìng was brought south by Northern scholars after the Tang dynasty imperial examination system took hold.

Even more extreme: characters like chang (腸, intestine) and shi (石, stone) have three or more distinct readings in samples from Xiamen and Taiwan.

Each reading is a historical layer. Stacked on top of each other like geological strata.

III. You Think ‘f’ Is Universal? Minnanese Doesn’t Have It.

Here’s something you’ve probably never thought about.

Mandarin has the “f” sound — fàn (rice), fēi (fly), fàng (release). You assume Chinese has always had this sound.

Minnanese doesn’t.

In Minnanese, “rice” is pronounced pn̄g — a bilabial plosive, built up behind both lips and released with a pop. This isn’t innovation. It’s imitation of how ancient Chinese was pronounced.

After the Sui and Tang dynasties, Chinese gradually developed the labiodental “f” sound. But before that, all those “f"s were “p” or “b” sounds. That’s why ancient texts used the same characters for “庖羲” (another name for the mythical figure Fuxi) and “匍匐” (to crawl) — they shared the same phonetic logic.

Minnanese preserved this feature for two thousand years.

Hakka is fascinating too. Hakka mostly distinguishes bilabial and labiodental sounds, but there are “escapees” — fēi (fly) is pui, fàng (release) is piong. This tells us Hakka speakers migrated south sometime between the Eastern Jin and late Tang — later than the Minnanese, but before Middle Chinese phonology had fully settled.

Three languages — Minnanese, Hakka, Mandarin — placed side by side form a living diagram of Chinese phonetic evolution.

IV. When You Say ‘Bento’, You’re Speaking Japanese

Modern Taiwanese has its own fascinating story.

Walk into a night market in Taipei, and the vendor will say pián-tong (bento) and kám-sim (thank you/moved). Both are Japanese loanwords, fully absorbed into Taiwanese Minnanese. Nobody thinks of them as foreign.

But try mentioning a “dehumidifier” or “microwave” in a Minnanese conversation, and something subtle happens — most people unconsciously switch to Mandarin pronunciation, even if the rest of the sentence stays in Minnanese.

That’s code-mixing. Linguists call it “lexical gap” — your mother tongue doesn’t have the word for it, so your brain automatically reaches into another language.

And many words are disappearing. Pnn-lue — a traditional rice-straining tool — has faded as electric rice cookers took over. Tuā-tn̂g-sann — traditional formal wear — has followed its garment into history.

Every word that disappears is a shard of civilization falling to the ground, never to be picked up again.

V. Why Does This Matter?

You might be thinking: this is all trivia.

229 vs 0 — so what? Kiānn vs hìng — does it affect my grocery shopping?

I think it does.

There’s a debate in linguistics: is Minnanese a “separate language” or a “Chinese dialect”? The argument for “separate language” is simple — Mandarin speakers can’t understand it.

But Y.R. Chao (the linguist who wrote the famous one-syllable poem “The Lion-Eating Poet”) proposed something called “color spectrum theory.” Dialects differ like colors in a spectrum — red gradually becomes orange with no clear dividing line. But they’re all light.

Minnanese, Hakka, Mandarin — same thing. Incomprehensibility doesn’t mean different origin.

In fact, those “incomprehensible sounds” contain Chinese’s oldest secrets. Minnanese’s ding is the Western Han. Hakka’s pui is the Tang and Song. Mandarin’s “f” is the post-Middle Chinese evolution.

Put them together, and you have a complete history of Chinese phonetic evolution.

Closing

Language isn’t just sound carried by the wind.

It’s a history textbook etched into your palate. The next time you say ding in a Taiwanese kitchen, the sound coming out of your mouth was already in use when Sima Qian was writing the Shiji — two thousand years ago.

What digital humanities can do is capture these sounds before they disappear, analyze them, and tell more people: what you thought was “rustic” is actually “ancient.”

Respecting your mother tongue isn’t about politics.

It’s about making sure a 2,000-year-old memory chip doesn’t lose power on our watch.