pang.

A few days ago, I had the privilege of witnessing my cousin’s beautiful wedding at the Botanic Gardens, followed by an unconventional yet delectable wedding celebration at the nearby Pangium.

The first dish on the menu was the Pang Susi, which the staff explained as a pastry filled with savory minced pepper pork. The staff traced the etymology of “Pang” to a creole word meaning “bread”. Because I was well into my Japanese Duolingo course, I was immediately reminded of the Japanese word for bread: “パン” or “pan”. And because the Korean variety show Running Man has long been a guilty pleasure, I also recalled that Korean for bread is “빵” or “ppang”. A further search also turned up “पाव” or “pav”, the Marathi, Hindi, and Konkani word for a type of bread pastry.

It turns out that the common root of all these was the Portuguese word “pão”, which is in turn derived from Latin “panis”.

When the Portugeuse colonized several parts of the Asia Pacific in the 1500s, they introduced bread-making, and the word “pão” became “pang” in Kristang (a creole language spoken in Malaysia and Singapore) and パン in Japanese. And it is likely to have spread to Korea as 빵 during the major Japanese occupations of Korea in the 16th and 20th centuries. The same happened when the Portuguese colonized the state of Goa in India, “pão” became “पाव” in Konkani, the language used in Goa. Thereafter, the term likely spread to Mumbai and was adopted into Marathi, and subsequently into Hindi.

A Mandarin speaker will probably have noticed the resemblance between “pão” and the Mandarin word “包” or “bao”, which can refer to a steamed bun with sweet or savory filling. Despite the uncanny similarity, the history of “包” is traced to a separate root. The word originally (and still) refers to a bundle and it is easy to see how that came to be adopted as the name for a delicious dough bundle filled with paste or meats.