Dr Lisa Lim, Associate Professor in the School of English, explores the origins and multiple meanings of the culturally evocative word ‘chop’ in her Post Magazine column: Language Matters.
“The word is wonderfully evocative of the passage and contact of peoples and cultures in earlier times. From the Hindi chaap, meaning stamp, imprint, seal or brand, or instrument for stamping (used already in 17th-century colonial Indian English), the word entered English in the early 19th-century as chop, referring to a trademark – a consequence of trade of the linguistic kind during the British empire’s expansion into the Indian subcontinent. Merchants and civil servants travelling from British India to other outposts of the empire spread the word.
In Hong Kong English “chop” refers to a seal or a stamp. Many of us will be familiar with the need to place a company chop on an official document. And personal name chops – traditional seals carved with names in Chinese characters, used typically with red ink – are made, along with more modern rubber stamps, throughout the territory, most famously in Sheung Wan’s “Chop Alley”, with its lines of chopmakers’ stalls.”
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| Source: SCMP |
Please click on the following link for the complete article:
http://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/article/1996080/where-does-word-chop-come
