烏魯木齊=People speak something about nonsense. 我查了一下"烏魯木齊"是新疆省之省會耶.為什麼用這個地名來形容people speak something about nonsense?有任何典故?

Stupidbeauty, maybe it is the way that name sounds that people use it to mean "nonsense", language can be very strange sometimes.

Some links for reference first. Please chip in your ideas first.

http://www.taiwanese-oki.idv.tw/t03.htm (See #0008.)
http://140.128.55.25/user197/e_news/9204/chin_6.htm (See item 7.)

Tim

There might be 3 possibilities of its derivation:
1.The language spoken in Xingkiang Province is 維吾爾語, it's just like Greek to Chinese living in mailand. So people refer it as "nonsense".(FYI:Taiwanese was one of the oldest languages spoken in mainland(中原),and then exported to southern Hokian(閩南),and then to Taiwan).
2. Wu-lu-mu-chi is read O-lok-bok-che in Taiwanese. O=black lok or lo = rotten, bad, bok=wood che= made.
So we always refer the term as "poor quality of a product".
3.O-lok-bok-che =a piece of work made with a rotten wood.
It's just a coincidence that it sounds like 烏魯木齊,so people simly use these 4 words to decribe the poor quality of a product.
4.Wurumuchi was one of the largest stops of "silk road"in ancient China, perhaps it was true that the quality of the merchandise imported from Wurumuchi was not so good.

The correct spelling for the capital of Xinjiang Autonomous Region, China:

Urumchi or Ürümqi (English IPA: [uːˈruːmtʃi]; Uyghur: ئۈرۈمچی; Uyghur Latin script: Ürümqi; Simplified Chinese: 乌鲁木齐; Traditional Chinese: 烏魯木齊; Pinyin: Wulumuqí

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cr%C3%BCmqi

Iwen,

Welcome aboard. Your input on this topic is informative. I will add what I know about it later when I have more free time.

Tim

As promised, I herein input what I know about this particular expression.

From my personal experience, I never heard anyone actually pronounce the second character as a 入聲 (lok) before I learned of it from books or the like. Therefore I think it might be helpful to clarify this from historical data. We can see from one of the links that 英廈辭典 said something about why it's so.

For this, we need to know when 英廈辭典 was published. From http://203.64.42.21/iug/ungian/SoannTeng/subok/POJ.htm, we can find 英廈辭典 and 英廈字典. The said dictionary should be the one called A Practical English-Hokkien Dictionary(實用英廈辭典), or any other one published after the establishment of Republican China or there won't be words like "清末明 (should be 民)初遠從烏魯木齊來臺的人或官員，談起該地的奇風異俗".

I am a dictionary collector and I have some older dictionaries first published back in the nineteenth century on Minnan (or Amoy) by foreign missionaries. The first one is called 廈英大辭典(Chinese-English Dictionary of the Vernacular or Spoken Language of Amoy) by Rev. Carstairs Douglas and published in 1873. The second is called English and Chinese Dictionary of the Amoy Dialect(英廈字典) by Rev. John McGowan and published in 1883. You can find oo1 loo2 bok8 ce5 (transcribed in TLPA for easier reading in this post) in both dictionaries.

In the first dictionary, under loo2, it says "oo1-loo2-bok8-ce5", Urumutsi, a place of severe transportation (see ce5). and under ce5, it says "oo1-loo2-bok8-ce5", Urumutsi, a Chinese province in Central Asia; said also in reference to travellers' tales, "all bosh".

The word bosh basically means nonsense in British English. In the second dictionary under "bosh", it says 烏木魯齊 (evidently a typo) oo1-loo2-bok8-ce5.

Tim

<Typo corrected for Urumutsi.>