Kurt has posted an interesting entry on typhoons. (I wonder why he's so desperate to find a Japanese guy who loves the rain, going so far as to saying this is his "seemingly unreachable goal in life" and seeing himself as a "tenkeiteki gaijin" (typical foreigner) in this case. Oh, that conceivably means most Americans LOVE the rain, eh?)

I used to think that the word "typhoon" came from Japanese. We have kanji characters meaning typhoon and its pronunciation is something like "Thai-who", which sounds similar to typhoon. As Kurt points out, if a word comes from a foreign language other than Chinese, we usually write it in katakana, a syllabary used mainly for representing foreign words. Then the Japanese Thai-who is from Chinese? I searched the Net and found there is no distinct answer for this. Who in the world is Thai-who? One potent theory puts it that Thai-who comes from English typhoon, applied the pronunciation into kanji. Wow. And another one is, as you can see, from Chinese. What makes the matter more confusing, some sources say that the Chinese version of typhoon may come from another language, such as Greek or Arabic. Hey, it's similar to the etymology of typhoon!

OK, the answer remains to be a mystery. Anyway, English has typhoon, and Japanese has Thai-who. No problem....