荔枝

lì zhī

Meanings

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lì zhī

1.litchi or lychee fruit (Litchi chinensis Sonn.)

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Wiktionary

1.lychee (Litchi chinensis) (Classifier: 顆／颗 m; 粒 c mn; 抽 c)

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Etymology

Unknown. First attested as 離支 in the “Rhapsody on the Shanglin Park” (上林賦) by Sima Xiangru of the West Han dynasty. During the time of Emperor Wu of Han, lychee was one of the exotic plants cultivated in the grand imperial Shanglin Park, introduced from China's south. Traditionally, 荔 has been interpreted as equivalent to 劙 (“to sever; to partition”), based on an excerpt from Funan-ji (扶南記), a now-lost text cited in other works, such as the Taiping Guangji (太平廣記): : The Compendium of Materia Medica, citing the “Preface to Lychee Painting” (荔枝圖序) by Bai Juyi, interprets 離支 orthographically: : Recent studies have discounted the above as folk etymologies, proposing instead that it is a disyllabic borrowing from a Kra-Dai language during the Late Old Chinese period; compare modern Zhuang laehcei, Tai Nüa ᥛᥣᥐᥱᥐᥣᥭᥱ (mǎakkǎay), Hlai coeis (Wei, 2000; Ban and Su, 2017). The precise shape of the source word is now obscure, and there are two possibilities that can explain the disyllabicity of the borrowing (Ban and Su, 2017): * That the first syllable transcribed a Kra-Dai class noun (perhaps “fruit”), and the second syllable, 枝 (OC *kje), corresponded to the Tai-Kadai name for “lychee”; or * That the Kra-Dai source word for “lychee” was disyllabic and already not easily analysable.

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