"joe" wrote in message
In Cantonese 'Chow' with the 2nd PinYin intonation means fry for eg. chow
meen(fried noodles) or chow farn(fried riced)

"Chow" is just a sound. You cannot be sure of the meaning of it. In
Chinese, because all words have only one syllable, there are a lot of
"homonyms" - words that are written differently, have different
meaning, but which sound exactly the same. (A childhood game is to
write out sentences with completely different characters then the
original so it reads the same but is total nonsense - bonus marks if
the new words actually mean something!)

One method of input in a Chinese word processor is to type the way it
sounds in English, then pick from a list of characters that sound
exactly the same. For "chaau", I found stirfry, copy, noisy, nest,
cash. When written, you can of course tell at a glance what it means.
When spoken, it all depends on context. ("Chaau sau", or "copy hand",
is a special northern wonton with a strange name, which is probably
what the "dumplings" in another post refers to.)

Compounded to this is the fact that to a foreigner's ears, different
sounds in Chinese may seem close enough that they would think they are
the same, and transcribe to the same English sounds. For example,
"chau" is a different sound, which may mean Autumn, stinky, jailed,
ugly, clown... No Cantonese person would mix "chaau" and "chau" up,
but in all likelyhood an English person would transcribe both of these
into "chow". Some similar sounds are "chiu" - dynasty, tide, face
towards, super ... or "jiu" - a surname, call, banana, pepper, chew...
This last one may even be the original "inspiration" for chow! who
knows...

From a Chinese person's perspective, it's easy for a Chinaman to [...]

Be careful, "chinaman" is now an offensive term, like "******".