土庫考：本土地名的源流與東亞世界的連結

Placenames are products from the interaction of human and places, so the etymological study of placename can reveal the historical activities of the people on land. This study investigates the etymology of ”Toko” to uncover its history and to reconstruct the historical relationships of this local placename in a greater context. This study finds Toko is a placename from a fire-proof warehouse, which had been documented since the fourteenth century. Sailors in the next century were aware of it and described similar constructions in Java with this name. By the late sixteenth century, Hokkien maritime merchants use this term to call European trade factories in the Southeast Asia as well as the Chinese ghetto in Nagasaki, Japan. This early modern expansion also brought this term to Taiwan and became many placenames in this newly established Hokkien community. However, ”toko” underwent semantic change in the nineteenth century. In the Southeast Asia, its trade factory sense was borrowed by Malay and became a Chinese element in the Southeast Asian culture. In Taiwan and China, however, people innovated another name for the thing used to be called ”toko” in the last century. The semantic changes break the surface relationship associated by this placename and require a critical investigation, such as this paper, to recover the historical underlying relation.