Language: who has borrowed from whom?

Talking to a student from Malaysia about the origins of the Malay term “mat salleh” for describing white people — thought to have been “mad sailors” for the white sailors in the early colonial days who’d get drunk and behave wildly.

She then added, ‘There is also the term “mat rempit” used for those young guys who race illegally on the roads and highways especially, on their motorbikes.’

Presumably, “mat” in “mat rempit” isn’t necessarily for the whites anymore, just “mad”.

As part of the extra mentoring that I offer students, I replied in Chinese, saying that “mat” certainly looks like the corrupted version of “mad”.  

In Chinese, “mad” = 瘋狂 / 疯狂 fēngkuáng.  

Apart from giving the breakdown of the compound (“mad crazy”), I also gave — as I always do for students who’re up to it and interested — the radicals for the two characters: sickness radical 疒 nè for 瘋 fēng / mad, and dog radical 犭quǎn for 狂 kuáng / crazy.

Then, I suddenly realised that the phonetic component 风 fēng / wind in 瘋 / 疯 is perhaps not purely for the sound / pronunciation element only.  I think there’s a logical contributive purpose.

One of the concepts in TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) is “wind”*.  I guess the closest English equivalent, in lay terms, is “draught”:  sitting in a draught can cause one to be ill.  Wind — usually cold, I think, for this purpose — will penetrate the system and cause all sorts of ailments.  Hence, the character for “mad” is written with the sickness radical and wind for the other component.

This, in turn, led me to the Malay term for “being mad/crazy”: kepala angin (/ˈaŋin/, [ˈa.ŋɪn]), which breaks down as “head wind”!  The wind has gone into one’s head, therefore “mad”.

So, is this a coincidence, or did one language borrow from the other?  If it is not a coincidence, I’d say it’s Malay borrowing from Chinese.

*wind:  Google says,

Quote

Wind is one of the six external factors of disease (six Qi or six Yin/Six Excesses). These climates can attack the body, enter the meridians, and cause external diseases; e.g., Cold Wind can cause a cold. Wind is a climatic condition that is observed everywhere, but is given a heightened importance in TCM.

Unquote

(climate in TCM = agents that cause disease)

• If you’re interested, more to be found in: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5234349/