In the Committee Dinghy Design thread, David wrote:
The definition of a sampan is 'three planks', ie flat bottom and slab sides.
This grabbed my attention.
Of course!
sān bǎn 三 板 "three plank"
Sampan would be a dialect pronunciation of "sanban". I never noticed that before.
Many Chinese words have entered the Engish language, often from southern Chinese dialects, and their counterparts in Mandarin can be easily seen. (Examples: typhoon, coolie, canteen - and the good old cup of "cha". But not the word "junk", by the way)
But wait - David, can you quote the source of this definition? If it is Worcester I wouldn't argue - different dialects, and Chinese language sound-ambiguity being what it is, I don't doubt it could have been true in the region in which he lived. Its certainly plausible.
But the problem is, I looked it up in my modern standard Chinese dictionaries and it doesn't seem to be the case. San ban does not seem to be a word in Chinese (at least, not these days) - but the translation for "sampan" seems always to be given as shān bǎn 舢 板
The same "ban" 板 character is there, meaning "plank" - (notice the two components of it, 木 the tree character (squashed up a bit) which means its something to do with wood - and the other component which can often give a clue as to pronunciation, as it does in this case).
But I can't find any meaning for that first syllable shan 舢 , it does not seem to have any meaning on its own, other than as an abbreviation for sampan. I wonder what its origin is?
I've written away to our member John K in Hong Kong for his opinion. Could any native speaker of Chinese please comment? My only native speaker friend, who is well-educated but knows nothing about boats, had never learnt that "shan" character.
Edit: I've just checked with my son. Despite that he knows little about boats, he wracked his brains for a moment and in the dark recesses of his memory, (he has a remarkably good one for matters linguistic) remembered the characters for sampan, and the fact that in mandarin it is shan ban, not san ban. He even remembered that incredibly obscure "shan" character. He thought it was probably a mandarin rendition of some dialect word for a specific type of boat. This character 舢 shan is made up from two components. Look closely, the first component is 舟 (zhou pronounced "joe") and as a stand-alone character it means "boat" so that tells us 舢 is probably something to do with boats. The first component is often a clue to meaning. The other component is easy - it is 山 shan which usually means "mountain" or hill, but its role here simply as a clue to pronunciation. So, this "shan" character 舢, the first syllable of "sampan", is probably derived from some no-longer-used, or arcane dialect word to do with boats - and the second syllable of course still means "plank". At least shanban now makes SOME sense Perhaps "three plank" (sanban) is a plausible homonym - almost a pun - which is a very common thing in Chinese. (Or it could have just been a very reasonable but incorrect assumption on the part of Worcester - or again it might have been a Chinese "spelling" mistake - the average Chinese person in Worcester's time would not have been very literate. Even today, people still sometimes get their characters wrong).
Did anyone really want to know all that?
(In fact "pun" comedy xiàngsheng or "cross talk" is an art form in China.
You'd better beware of homonyms if you are thinking to give your boat a Chinese name. The language is full of them. Occasionally unprintable. Yes, they have those words too, of course - and use them pretty frequently too).
................................................... (thanks David)
Now, this might be interesting. Let us take "3-plank" as at least a good working definition for what we today would call a sampan - simplicity itself, and just the very thing for a junk rig!
(Mark, Dinghy Design Committee - it would be very nice if the winner of the dinghy design contest could be a Chinese sampan - after all, a 3-plank sampan would be easy to make and could make quite a good tender, being not unlike a Scandinavian praam dinghy. How about John K coming up with an authentic Chinese sampan about 8' ? )
I don't think the Golden Bay or the Drake 13 (both 3-planked) could be called sampans - to me they belong with a class of American skiffs - but surely Freebie could be called a sampan.
And surely Annie's cute little dink really WANTS to be called a sampan, even though she's 5-planked (No, Ratty, not Annie - the dinghy I mean!)
I quite like the ideas of the late R. D. Culler who has designed some excellent 3-plank traditional American skiffs (one of which, his 13'6" Good Little Skiff, would make a nice junket boat).
Culler also has a sampan in his delightful book Skiffs and Schooners.
At 11' I think Culler's sampan is too big for a tender and too small for a junket boat, but here it is anyway.
(Excuse the scribbles on the drawing. That's from 40 years ago when I was thinking of building one and now I can't erase it.)
Culler liked a lot of flare in his flat bottom designs - same principle as Arne and David have applied to their 5-plank designs, I guess.
I hope this is all good covid distraction.
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