Most historians accept the explanation that the name "Sai Gon" lifted its pronunciation from the Vietnamese word for the kapok or ceiba tree, Ceiba pentandra, which is known as "cay goong" or "cay gon" in Vietnamese. Ceiba trees reach a height of forty meters; have palmate leaves, and large bell shaped flowers. Their thick, woody seedpods contain a fiber that resembles cotton. Years ago, this fiber was commonly used for mattresses.
"The city's present name," Antoine Brebion noted in the Revue Indochinoise (Indochinese Review, 1911), "comes from the large number of ceiba trees surrounding the old earth-built fortifications.’Sai Gon’ consists of two parts: 'Sai' in Chinese means 'wood,' and 'gon' in Vietnamese means 'ceiba.' According to Guidas Madroile's Manuel du Voyageur en Indochine du Sud (Handbook for the traveler in South Indochina, 1928), missionaries were already using "Sai Gon, forest of ceiba trees" in their letters during the eighteenth century. However, this explanation does not seem convincing for syntactic reasons. If "Sai Gon" were a Vietnamese word translated as "forest of ceiba trees," then the order of the words would be inverted into "gon" + "sai." Moreover, Vietnamese compound words formed from Sino ("Sai") and Vietnamese ("gon") elements are extremely rare. Further, "sai" means "wood," not "forest."
Two Vietnamese professors - Pham Thieu and Ca Van Thinh - explain that Chinese traders from Guangdong Province pronounced "cay gon" (ceiba) as "thay ngon," which means "urban center on the bank of a river and near a dam." The original meaning of the word "cay gon" is thus completely distorted. One also wonders why the Southern Chinese would transcribe "Sai Gon" as "Tay Cong" if the reasons were purely phonetic. In any case, it is clear that the etymology of "Sai Gon" deserves deeper study.
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