Flipping through Endymion Wilkinson's Chinese History: A New Manual I came across the following excerpt:
36 Food & Drink
36.7 Ming-Qing
Mangoes: fansuan 番蒜, mangguo 芒果 (Malay mangga?)
番蒜 is a very funny word to call mangoes. 番蒜 is basically made up of two parts:
Did the ancients really think mangos were garlic like? Or am I missing something?
Actually the 蒜 is evidence of a substrate influence from an Austroasiatic language (ancestor of Vietnamese xoài or Khmer ស្វាយ [svaay]) in this context. Indeed, this lexeme actually does have its own Chinese character, 檨, with Mandarin pronunciation shē (ㄕㄜ).
It is the Hakka and Min varieties which use this 檨 lexeme:
In many of these varieties, the pronunications of 蒜 are very close:
Hence the substitution of 蒜 was motivated by phonetic similarity (假借) with the lack of "availability" of this 檨 character.
In many of these, the collocation 番檨, preferred in Min Dong and certain varieties of Hakka, may help distinguish it from just 蒜. Or it may just be that mangoes came a bit later to the northeastern Fujian area than the southern area.
