Sam Gaskin: Stop saying 'Boond' already
According to half the English speakers in Shanghai, “bunned” would also be a different pronunciation. One of the great rifts that runs through this town, like the Huangpu, severing Puxi from Pudong, is how to pronounce the word “Bund,” the centerpiece of Shanghai history and its main tourist magnet.
Some say “Bund” the way it’s written, so that it rhymes with “fund.” It’s an economical and unembellished sound, plain and practical as a shoelace knot.
Others say it so it rhymes with “spooned.” Written phonetically, “boond,” it could be comic book onomatopoeia for a jet exploding. Ka-boom. The sound lingers like a wound.
Neither pronunciation has anything to do with the Chinese name for the area, which is waitan (外滩).
Having lived in Shanghai for a few years now, I want to settle this thing.
A question of import
Eddy Mu is the Deputy Chief Editor of “The Bund” magazine (“外滩画报”). He says the publication should be pronounced “the boond” in English.
“Some staff at the magazine pronounce it ‘bunned,’ but I think those who’ve got enough knowledge about that time [in Shanghai’s colonial history] -- when the name was first imported into China -- say ‘boond,’” says Mu.
“The word came to China from India, which used to be an English colony,” he continues. “When England first got a grasp of China, especially Shanghai, the word came with them.”
‘Boond,’ in Hindustani at least, means drop. ‘Bunned’ would be what I would understand as embankment.— Vikram Chandra, author
Complicating things, there is another “bund” in English, which is borrowed from German. It’s pronounced “boond,” and means association or organisation. The most famous application of the word in English is the German American Bund, an organization that sang the praises of Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
Mentions of Nazis may bring more Google searches to this article, but Mu explains that, “the German word has nothing to do with it. The area in Shanghai was developed by the English.”
All the credible sources I could find agree with him.
Shanghai picked up the word “Bund” from India via the English. But the question remains: how is the Indian word pronounced?
Pronunciation guide
I asked Indian-born author Vikram Chandra that question before his recent visit to Shanghai. He says that the word in question is typically Romanized as ‘band’ in India, and it refers to “an embankment between farms, or between fields.”
“I think I use the word somewhere in [my novel] ‘Sacred Games’ towards the end,” he says. “Children walking on the bands between fields. ‘Boond,’ in Hindustani at least, means drop. ‘Bunned’ would be what I would understand as embankment.”
Derek Sandhaus, chief editor of China history publisher Earnshaw Books, agrees. He says he’s seen dozens of assertions that the word Bund came to Shanghai from Hindustani, and one of the books in his catalogue, “Tales of Old Shanghai,” discusses the pronunciation.
“It says that the Shanghai Bund is not pronounced in the German sense, but to rhyme with ‘shunned.’ Also, I've met people who grew up in old Shanghai and they pronounce it in the same way,” Sandhaus says.
Of course, fidelity to the source language isn’t the only consideration when we choose how to pronounce a foreign word. After all, most of us say "Par-riss," not "Par-ree."
But, as pretentious as the French pronunciation is, at least it’s correct. The same can’t be said for people who say “boond,” pushing their mouths into a pouty hoot, like owls on the pull.
