This is a question for readers with knowledge of Chinese. How do you
say "water chestnuts" in Cantonese and in Mandarin?

More generally, does anybody know of a webpage aimed English/Western
speakers listing the *Chinese characters* (or at least the
phonetically transcribed words) for typical Chinese cooking
ingredients such as fermented black beans and Szechuan peppercorns?

Thanks in advance,

Jill

P.S. I know that there's a book out there on "demystifying the Asian
grocery store", but I think that if I could just find the Chinese
characters for the ingredients, I could get along fine.

P.S.2 Since my newserver does not carry alt.food.asian and Google
groups is a bit slow in showing new posts, I would appreciate to get a
copy of any reply by e-mail (but use the address I'm about to give
below!). The address above is not a good one though, since it is
usually filled with spam. To get a better address please replace
everything before the "@" with jkrugman345. Sorry for this
inconvenience.

In om,
Jill Krugman > typed:

> This is a question for readers with knowledge of Chinese. How
do you
> say "water chestnuts" in Cantonese and in Mandarin?


I'm not a speaker of Chinese, but I own a book called "A Popular
Guide to Chinese Vegetables," by Martha Dahlen and Karen
Phillipps. The following Cantonese names (they don't provide
Mandarin ones) are from that book.

Water Chestnuts (the kind with what looks like horns) are Ling
gok.

Chinese Water Chestnuts (the round ones) are Ma raai.

--
Ken Blake
Please reply to the newsgroup

"Jill Krugman" > wrote in message
om...

Hello,

> This is a question for readers with knowledge of Chinese. How do you
> say "water chestnuts" in Cantonese and in Mandarin?

I only speak Cantonese, so I'm afraid I can't help you with the Mandarin
name (although I'm pretty sure it is not the same as the Cantonese name).
Water chestnuts are called "mah tai." However, since English is monotone
and Cantonese has about 4 tones for most sounds like "mah", I'm not sure how
to convey the proper sound to you.

> More generally, does anybody know of a webpage aimed English/Western
> speakers listing the *Chinese characters* (or at least the
> phonetically transcribed words) for typical Chinese cooking
> ingredients such as fermented black beans and Szechuan peppercorns?

Fermented blacks beans are called "dow see" and Szechuan peppercorns are
called "fah jiu."
I'm sorry I can't be of more help regarding any sort of website.

> Thanks in advance,
>
> Jill
>
> P.S. I know that there's a book out there on "demystifying the Asian
> grocery store", but I think that if I could just find the Chinese
> characters for the ingredients, I could get along fine.

Perhaps you can search the web for pictures of the items you're looking for
and show them to the clerks at the local grocery store in your local
Chinatown.

> P.S.2 Since my newserver does not carry alt.food.asian and Google
> groups is a bit slow in showing new posts, I would appreciate to get a
> copy of any reply by e-mail (but use the address I'm about to give
> below!). The address above is not a good one though, since it is
> usually filled with spam. To get a better address please replace
> everything before the "@" with jkrugman345. Sorry for this
> inconvenience.

Perhaps you can try some of the free, text-only news servers. My ISP's news
server is terrible, so I use news.individual.net which is free. Go to
http://news.individual.net/register.html for instructions. All you have to
do is provide them with a name (I use a fake one myself) and valid email
address to send you your login information. Don't worry, they won't send
you any spam or give out your email address. It even allows you to post.
Another free news server is news.readfreenews.net (no login required).
However, it is read-only (no posting).