Early in my training I was told that Wing Chun used to have poetic, cryptic names for it's techniques and concepts but that they were replaced by simple descriptors to make learning easier. This simplification was attributed to Ip Man but I would assess that if it was all that recent then many mainland systems would still use the original names.
For example, Jum, jut, tan, fuk etc all relate to an action or intent (they are verbs rather than nouns). This makes it easy to know what (energy) to train. Bong sau is, of course, the obvious exception to that rule in that bong describes the shape because bong has many different possible intents/actions depending on the requirement (I call it Wing Chun's swiss army knife - there is a bong sau for every occasion but, like a swiss army knife, there may be a better tool for that individual job...)
Anyway, I digress. I gather that YKS still have names like 'White crane seizes the fox' and 'swimming dragons' etc. Does anyone know more about this or even know/still use the old names if they even existed?
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Originally Posted by Hendrik
