Soap

[Kobo-Daishi]

Dear readers,

What is the Cantonese for 'soap'?

Would you give the characters and romanization, if possible. Thanks.

Kobo-Daishi, PLLA.

[ichi]

Er, I don't know how it's written, and you'll have excuse my romanization too :p

--fahn-- /gaan/ (high tone followed by rising; mid rising or high rising I'm not sure). This may be colloquial.

[Mak Zai]

Hi Kobo-Daishi,

Now to the soap question. It's written as follows: 番梘 faan1 gaan2

If you use pin-yin to type in words as I do, you can type fan1 jian3.

You should be able to find 梘 jian3 on your computer.


麥仔

[Terence]

The original character for soap is 鹼 gaan2, 香鹼 hoeng1 gaan2 or (those soap imported from foreign countries, now all soap with the similar shape and quality as those imported are called 番鹼 faan1 gaan2 too.)
木見 is a character currently used to replaced 鹼, some dictionaries have taken 木見 to mean soap but classified it as a dialectal character. 木見 has the same sound as 鹼 but it actually means aquaduct as 筧.

[Kobo-Daishi]

Dear all,

Thank you for your replies.

The dictionary at this site doesn’t seem to have a definition for the character 梘, though they do have a picture of the character at this link:

http://www.chinalanguage.com/cgi-bin/char.cgi?6898

The dictionary does have a definition for 鹼.

Variant forms for

鹼, http://www.chinalanguage.com/cgi-bin/char.cgi?9E7C are

碱 http://www.chinalanguage.com/cgi-bin/char.cgi?78B1

鹻 http://www.chinalanguage.com/cgi-bin/char.cgi?9E7B


and the following character, which is mapped at Unicode, but which I don’t seem to have a font for

http://www.chinalanguage.com/cgi-bin/char.cgi?2a27f

Does anyone know of a Unicode font that does include this character?

A variant that is in gb encoding is

硷 http://www.chinalanguage.com/cgi-bin/char.cgi?7877 .

Another variant is鹵+見, but, I don’t think there is a Unicode number for it so I don’t have a link to a graphic for it.

Kobo-Daishi, PLLA.

[ppk]

碱 or 硷 means alkaline in general. thats probably the main characteristics of soaps.