"Thanks" in Hakka and other Sinitic topolects

I forget who it was and for what reason, but a week or two ago, someone said "Thank you" in Hakka to me.

That got me thinking about all the different ways to say "thanks" in Sinitic languages.

Here's a map of Sinitic topolectal equivalents for MSM (Modern Standard Mandarin) "xièxie 謝謝 / 谢谢" (“thank you”).  If you click on the place names in characters at the bottom of the map, pinyin romanizations will be supplied.

Bear in mind that European-style  words of etiquette such as "hello" and "thanks" did not exist in China before the 20th century.  For the impact of English on the development of such spoken Mandarin civilities, see Mary S. Erbaugh, "China expands its courtesy:  Saying 'Hello' to Strangers," The Journal of Asian Studies, 67.2 (May, 2008), 621-652.

Here is the abstract:

Courtesy reveals fundamental judgments about who merits respect. Traditional Chinese courtesy rests on lifelong hierarchical bonds that are too clear to require constant verbal reinforcement. But strangers, women, peasants, migrant workers, and others often do not merit face work because they lack status, fall outside the network of insiders, or are politically taboo. Until very recently, European-style equivalents of “hello,” “please,” “thanks,” “sorry,” or “goodbye” existed only in impersonal-sounding translations restricted to brief contacts with foreigners. As Beijing steps back from the socialist revolution, it is promoting these “five courteous phrases” (ni hao, qing, dui bu qi, xiexie, zai jian) to expand courtesy to universal, reciprocal greetings. Popular acceptance of this “verbal hygiene” is spreading via rapid, urban service encounters in which one's connections are unknown. In this way, China's self-identity as an “advanced civilization” is being retooled in international terms.

The following is a list of scores of different topolectal equivalents of "thank you" provided by Wiktionary:

It is evident that many of these expressions are not cognate with each other, so they must be based on a wide variety of sources that have been pressed into service to match English "thank you".  Although all of the entries are intrinsically interesting, I will not pursue each of them to their origins and explain their etymologies, but will focus only on three that are particularly intriguing.

First is Mandarin xièxie 謝謝  itself, which is formed by the reduplication of xiè 謝.  In premodern Sinitic, xiè 謝 meant things like "to excuse oneself; to make an apology; to apologize; to decline; to renounce; to refuse; take leave; leave; say goodbye".  When I explain the meaning and usage of "xiè 謝" in pre-contemporary times, I demonstrate it in a  dramatic fashion by showing how a Manchu princess who was a friend of my wife would exclaim "xiè 謝!" when she took leave after a visit to our home.  My students were always stunned when I acted out her departure.  They never forgot the difference between "xiè 謝" and "xièxie 謝謝" after that.

Second is "ālǐjiāduō 阿里加多", which occurs in several of the Taiwan topolects.  This must be Japanese arigatō ありがとう (“thank you”), which would have come to Taiwan during the colonial period.

Third is Sokuluk (Gansu Dungan) рахмат, which I was delighted to recognize immediately, even without the notation "Dungan").  Because I know some Uyghur, I am familiar with the spoken Uyghur word rehmet ("thanks").  Dungans, whose roots are in northwest China (Shaanxi, Ningxia, Gansu, and Qinghai) are Sinitic-speaking Muslims (Хуэйзў (回族) who fled to Central Asia after their rebellion against the Qing Dynasty government was quashed by Manchu forces in the latter part of the 19th century where they settled in what is now Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan and became successful farmers and entrepreneurs.  Sinographic lliterates when they left China, they learned how to read and write their Sinitic tongue in the Cyrillic alphabet.  They must have borrowed рахмат from the Turkic Kyrgyz or the likewise Turkic Uyghurs who first romanized their language but then switched to the Cyrillic alphabet during the Soviet period.  Subsequently, they changed back to the Latin alphabet and then to the Arabic alphabet, thus رەھمەت, under the "guidance" of the Chinese government who conquered Eastern Central Asia (ECA, aka Xinjiang) during the 50s after the communist revolution.  I was present in Xinjiang during the 80s when the CPC hastily imposed the Arabic alphabet on the Uyghurs.  The radical change of alphabet was very confusing during the initial period.

We (Americans and Europeans) think of "thank you" (or its equivalents in other languages) as an essential part of human speech.  When I observe Euro-Americans teaching their children how to interact with people who give them something or help them in some way, I hear them say, "What do you say?" or "Say 'thank you'.  But that has not always been the case in Sinitic languages and other non-IE tongues.  Of course , they must have had other ways to acknowledge indebtedness or gratitude (gracias, grazie, merci, spasibo / cпасибо, etc.), but such expressions are obligatory for most polite, civilized Europeans.

Selected readings

• "'Have a good day!' in Mandarin" (9/5/12)
• "No Word for Thank You" (5/6/06)
• "Dungan, a Sinitic language of Central Asia written in the Cyrillic Alphabet" (6/14/21)
• "'Onion' in Persian, Turkic, Mongolian, Manchu, Dungan (northwest Mandarin), and Indic" (3/21/20)
• "Dungan: a Sinitic language written with the Cyrillic alphabet" (4/20/13)
• "The look, feel, and sound of Dungan language" (10/15/20)
• "'Jesus' in Dungan" (7/16/14)
• "Dungan-English dictionary" (10/26/18) — online here
• "Pinyin in practice" (10/13/11), esp. these two comments (here and here).
• "Writing Sinitic languages with phonetic scripts" (5/20/16)
• "Sinitic languages without the Sinographic script" (3/5/19)
• "The impact of phonetic inputting on Chinese languages" (12/9/19)
• Victor H. Mair, "Implications of the Soviet Dungan Script for Chinese Language Reform", Sino-Platonic Papers, 18 (May, 1990) (free pdf).
• Omniglot.
• Wikipedia:  "Dungan people", "Dungan language"