A Story

詠 = chant; intone; sing
(言 speech + 水 water)
春 = spring, first of four seaons, alive, vitality
(日sun )
拳 = fist / style of kung fu

詠春拳 Wing Chun Kung Fu, or simply 詠春 "Wing Chun" is a kung fu style.

A note on the phonetic spellings of "Wing Chun and Ving Tsun"
Ving Tsun Kung Fu is another way of transliterating Wing Chun Kung Fu. I share a similar sentiment that Prof Lueng Ting wrote in the forward of his book which my Sifu lent to me, "Roots & Branches of Wing Tsun". Remember, everything is meant to be taken with a grain of salt.

A snippet from the forward, "Before I write this book, I have a little problem of using a suitable spelling for the original 詠春 style, a Chinese kungfu style which was without any English name before the 50s. Bruce Lee might be the first one to spell 詠春 as 'W-I-N-G C-H-U-N'. However, people in Hong Kong and Europe do not really list this spelling because the initials "W.C." sound wuite funny to the kungfu people of this style! Instead, they spell 詠春 as "V-I-N-G T-S-U-N". However, according to phoenetics, there is actually no such a "V" sound in Cantonese... In fact, the techniques passed down by the late Grandmaaster Yip Man to me directly are more or less different from that to most of his other students. Further, due to the different periods and ideas of different people, 詠春 is not quite the same both in techniques and in concepts from the Yip Man's kungfu clan to the others, though all of us still bear the Chinese name of 詠春! For the above reasons in this book, I try to express the branch of 詠春 which was passed down from Ng Mui to Grandmaster Yip Man and to me via Dr. Leung Jan and his song Leung Bik, by spelling of 'WING TSUN'. Whereas I spell 'WING CHUN' to express the style of other people of the same family.

Wing Chun related words in this dictionary comes from my practice of Wing Chun under Sifu Miguel Hernandez with the NYC Ving Tsun community. Sifu Miguel Hernandez learned under 師公 Si-Gong 梅逸 Moy Yat, who we address as our 師公 Si-Gong (Sifu's master), and Si-Gong Moy Yat learned under our 師太公 Si-Dai-Gong (Sifu's master's master, our kungfu great-grandfather), 葉問 Yip Man. This branch of Wing Chun is considered be part of Yip Man family lineage.

The legend is that this branch of kung fu was founded by a woman named 五枚 Ng Mui who resided and studied in the Shaolin Monastery before it's destruction. Ng Mui taught this style of kung fu to a woman named Yim Wing-chun to defend herself. Later this system would be named after Yim Wing Chun. - want to check in with Sifu on this story.

Wing Chun, has been popularized in media with movies about 葉問 Yip Man (also spelled Ip Man), who taught 李小龍 Bruce Lee and is a foundation of Bruce Lee's kung fu, 截拳道 Jeet Kune Do.

Date Added: 1/31/2023
Last Updated: 6/22/2023