jong
jong
Javanese/Malay
“The Chinese sailing vessels that dominated Asian trade for a thousand years are named not with a Chinese word but a Javanese one — and the name has nothing to do with garbage.”
In Javanese and Malay, jong (also djong) referred to large seagoing ships. When Portuguese traders reached Southeast Asia in the early 1500s, they encountered enormous multi-masted vessels carrying spices, silk, and ceramics between China, Java, India, and East Africa. The Portuguese borrowed jong and wrote it as junco. The word passed to English as junk by the 1550s.
The ships themselves were engineering marvels. Chinese junks had watertight bulkhead compartments — a technology Europe would not adopt until the 1800s. They carried magnetic compasses centuries before Europeans did. Zheng He's treasure fleet of the early 1400s included junks over 120 meters long, dwarfing anything Columbus would sail decades later.
The English word junk acquired its separate meaning of 'worthless stuff' from a completely different source — Middle English jonk, meaning old rope. The collision of these two unrelated words is pure accident. The boat junk and the rubbish junk share spelling and nothing else. Yet the confusion has unfairly diminished the reputation of one of history's greatest ship designs.
Junks still sail in Hong Kong's Victoria Harbour and across the South China Sea. The Javanese word that named them has outlasted the empires that built them — the Majapahit, the Ming, the Qing. It is a word that remembers a time when the largest, most advanced ships on Earth sailed east of the Suez, and Europe was a maritime backwater.
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Today
The tragedy of junk is that English speakers hear garbage when they should hear genius. The ships that bore this name were the most sophisticated ocean vessels of their era — compartmentalized, compass-guided, and capable of crossing the Indian Ocean when European sailors still hugged their coastlines.
"Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering." — Augustine of Hippo. A Javanese word for a masterwork of naval engineering deserves better than its homophone.
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