14 THE LYCHEE AND LUNGAN 



consists, namely: ^ which in the contracted form is written )\- and 

 means "grass" or "plant" and 7J which means " knife." We 

 then have at the top of the character ^ a "plant " and at the bottom 

 "three knives." Wu Ying K'uei points out that these three knives, 

 written $,, represents "to cut." The sound of this character^, 

 pronounced "li", is doubtless a corruption of the sound lay", 

 associated with the character gf|, which was used to represent the 

 fruit before the idea was originated to give it the present "knife 

 and plant" character^. It is also worthy of note that Wu Ying 

 K'uei cautions all writers of Chinese to write the word li" | and 

 not | as so many do. The character $ is pronounced "hip " and 

 means "to cooperate" and is foreign to the original idea of using 

 the three knife character 5w, "to cut. " 



Wu Ying K'uei' s (^Hyit) claim for writing the word lychee 

 is doubtless well established in so far as its derivation is con- 

 cerned. But modern usage reveals that the word in Chinese may 

 be correctly written , ||, ^&, or |t. Just as to-day in English 

 "through " and "thru " are both good forms with considerable pre- 

 ference for thru especially in hand writing, so in Chinese both J 

 and | are considered good forms with decided preference for | in 

 handwriting because of the care required not to cross the strokes in 

 making the knife radical )}. In fact in hand writing most Chinese 

 writers will unconsciously .write -ft. 



The word lychee g*,^ is thus a combination of idiographs 

 which are used in the derivation of the characters %, and ^ and in 

 the pronunciation of their sounds. These characters were meant 

 to convey the idea that the fruit of the lychee must be taken from the 

 tree by means of knives and with twigs attached. 



There is as much difficulty in arriving at the correct form for 

 representing the characters (|^t) in English as there is in deciding 

 upon the correct characters in Chinese. In representing the Can- 

 tonese sounds of the characters in English lychcc is the most 

 satisfactory form. The fruit is a South China fruit and should be 

 called by the name given it by Cantonese because they not only grow 

 the fruit but sell it all over the world. The name of the fruit as 

 pronounced in western countries always approximates the Cantonese 

 sound. In China the name is pronounced in many ways according 

 to the local dialect of the place. For example in Fukien Icli is one 

 of the local names under which it is known. It is true that the most 

 universal dialect of China is Mandarin, which is the official language 



