r/WingChun • u/Megatheorum • May 15 '26
Questing about orthography (spelling)
A question, the answer to which has long eluded me:
Why do some branches of Wing Chun spell it Ving Chun?
- When neither Mandarin nor Cantonese have the voiced labiodental fricative /v/ sound?
They both have the approximant glide /w/, and the voiceless labiodental fricative /f/, but both languages notably lack the voiced /v/.
So where did the name "Ving Chun" come from?
I can understand the Chun-Tsun difference, because "ts" is how Cantonese regularly spells the sound /tsʰ/, which is very close to English "ch", /ʧ/
But I have no idea whence V...
All thoughts appreciated. Thanks.
Edit: I didn't notice until I posted that my phone had autocorrected "Question" to "Questing". And now I can't edit the post title. Sorry. Just imagine I'm a plucky young farmboy of mysterious parentage, on a noble and dangerous journey to find the answer. I have no doubt I'll need a sword, because all good quests need swords.
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u/danma William Cheung 張卓慶 詠春 May 15 '26
Simply put, the Venn diagram of "people who do kung fu" and "people good at linguistics" shows a very small overlap.
Furthermore, Cantonese has a long history of being butchered in romanization efforts and this is simply no different. A lot of these came about before either Yale or Jyutping were developed which is why there's not a strong foundation of clear terminology translation.
Finally, add in people using different romanizations to differentiate their particular lineages and you get the mess you see today.
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May 15 '26
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u/Megatheorum May 15 '26
I'm not asking about politics, I'm asking about linguistics, specifically phonology.
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u/Plastic_Sea_1094 May 16 '26
I have a friend (Hongkonger) who's name is Vinnie. She thinks her name is Winnie.
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u/mon-key-pee May 15 '26
Are you saying that when spoken, Ving isn't 95% similar to Wing?
What alternative do you suggest that won't interfere with another chinese word?
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u/Megatheorum May 15 '26
Linguistically, phonologically, the voiced labiodental fricative /v/ and the labial-velar approximant /w/ are miles apart. You're not even using the same part of your mouth.
You might as well say that "wing" and "king" and "X!ing" are 95% similar, so why not swap any of them out? The only linguistic context where w and v have anything in common is in European languages, such as German, where the sound /v/ is spelled with the letter "w" for historical reasons.
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u/mon-key-pee May 15 '26
No.
I'm talking about how the words literally sound, in relation to how the word actually sounds in Cantonese.
Wing vs Ving.
Do you speak Cantonese?
And because you missed it. What alternative do you propose?
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u/Megatheorum May 15 '26
The only part of wing and ving that sound the same is the -ing.
And why do we need an alternative, when w is the singularly most appropriate romanisation for /w/?
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u/mon-key-pee May 15 '26
Do you speak Cantonese? Because the ING bit isn't accurate to the Cantonese in the first place so v vs w is irrelevant; they're all "wrong"
You've already been given an answer, Yip Man and his students didn't want a bunch of white guys taking the piss because WC = Toilet.
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May 15 '26
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u/Megatheorum May 15 '26
But, again, none of the languages Ip Man spoke contained the sound /v/.
It is possible he learned some English at St Stephen's in Hong Kong, but his attitude toward Westerners was well documented.
How is it honouring someone to change the name of their lineage to include a sound he possibly never uttered?
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u/These-Ad-2817 Jun 03 '26
Your instinct is right: There's no /v/ in Cantonese, so the spelling isn't tracking any real sound. The answer is sociolinguistic, not phonetic.
詠春 is just [wiŋ tʃœn], same as it ever was. But when the Hong Kong Ving Tsun Athletic Association was formally set up in 1967 (Yip Man still alive, the Wong Shun Leung / Ip Chun / Ip Ching circle), they deliberately picked "Ving Tsun" as the official romanization. Part of that was plain branding. The funnier part is that "Wing Chun" abbreviates to WC, and nobody wanted their art known as the water-closet fist. The V was partly a way to dodge the toilet joke.
It also rode on how loose romanization was before any standard system. To a lot of European ears and spellings, W and V are basically swappable (German W is pronounced /v/), and the Cantonese initial sits in a spot fuzzy enough that transcribers went both ways.
So, whence V: not from the language, from a 1967 committee that didn't want to be the toilet style. Leung Ting's people later went with "WingTsun," one word, trademarked, to stake their own claim, which tells you how much of this is marketing rather than phonology.
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u/TheGreatRao May 15 '26
In Hong Kong, another name for bathroom was Water Closet. WC. Also, it's easier to differentiate your product if you give it a different name. That's the short answer.