Hello all,a recent disagreement over the name 'Shojo no mai' has spurned me to write this. I am more familiar with Chinese language,sorry it's a bit long,but hopefully I can shed some light on the way these names are written and perhaps help appreciate how some trees were given their names. Firstly though let me explain that you will see two different ways Japanese write names of trees. ガーネットis a phonetic style of writing,used when naming all non-Japanese cultivars.If shown to a Japanese person,he will say (roughly) ''Butterfly'',but what he is saying may have absolutely no meaning to him,just a strange word.蝶 is the old Chinese style character used by Japan and if shown to a Japanese person,he will think of the beautiful winged insect as we do,but will say a completely different word(I only know chinese)You will notice that the newer writing ガーネットis always used to refer to the tree called 'Butterfly'.This is because......well we couldn't expect someone from France...say Gomero/Emery for example(sorry guys absolutely no offence) to sell their trees under the name 'Papillon' because we have to stick to the original name,no matter the language,even if it makes no sense to us. Ok,what we have to remember now is that this is a very old language.Originally everything in the world had to be described using just the few hundred characters in the language,this is still the case in China.Imagine the difficulties trying to put a name to all the modern inventions using just these old characters.For example to name a refridgerator,all they could do was combine the words for 'ice' and 'box',and this is what we'll see if we punch these characters into our translators seperately. When we see the names,like 'Shojo no mai',it is just a phonetic version of the characters,but unlike Chinese,I'm not sure there is a set standard for conversion to english,as even on the Japanese websites there are discrepancies. The first Japanese character in 'Shojo'(猩々) does indeed appear in the 'monkey' group of characters,some of them do look a little like a monkey(with a lot of imagination)and in Chinese when doubled is infact the 'Orangutan',but we shouldn't assume it is a reference to a monkey.There's just too many trees with the 'monkey' name for it to make sense ha ha. The character 猩 may be used for instance alongside the character for 'red' to expain a particular shade of red..scarlet,or perhaps with the character for 'hot',to explain scarlet fever.....remember they have to work with the characters they have. In the case of the trees,I think they are using this particular 'monkey' character more for a reference to the colour,as in the name 'Shindeshojo' the character before shojo(de) means 'to produce,come out,rise etc.(in chinese)..this would make more sense.....'Shin' just means 'new' and is pronounced similarly in Chinese. We shouldn't take the translations we see too literally,as In Beni Maiko,...sure 'Maiko' is a dancing girl but she does more than that. 'Maikos' are infact the young girls you see when you travel to Japan,wearing Geisha type costumes,they are infact apprentice Geishas,learning to become a Geisha,which takes many years. 'Katsura' makes no sense when punched into a translator....just says 'Katsura'....but to the guy who discovered the tree,must surely have reminded him of their beloved Katsura trees which glow orange and yellow in the autumn. We've probably all seen the characters 紅葉 used to describe our beloved trees.....put into a translator it'll just say 'red leaves' or similar,but to a Japanese person will have the deeper meaning of the autumn leaves of the Maple. As I've said I only know how chinese language works,but hopefully next time you translate your tree's names you may be able to see past the immediate literal translation given,and have some idea of what was going through the minds of the people who discovered the tree.It's not easy and I can't often make sense of it,but when I can,it makes it even more beautiful. Maybe one day a person well versed in Japanese could shed more light on this subject.
Houzi, thanks for taking the time to write this, good info to know, and hopefully can stimulate more discussion on the topic. (On a technical note: many westerners may not have their operating system and or browser set up to display Japanese/Chinese characters properly and will see squares instead. Here are links to a couple of webpages giving advice on displaying the characters properly: http://japanese.about.com/od/fonts/a/displayjapanese.htm http://www.jp41.com/firefox/japanese/)
Cheers Maf,you seem quite well informed on Katakana/Hiragana...I only know a bit of Chinese so could be completely wrong ha.Do you know of any online translator that can translate Romaji into any of the 3 scripts?....I guess that's expecting a bit much though.
Great post Houzi, thanks. Pleased to report that Papillon is still called Butterfly in France :), and that I could see the characters just fine. -E
Though I must admit,I prefer the name Papillon :) Interestingly I noticed a Japanese website with either 'Shaina' or 'Skeeters',I can't remember.They were calling it(in Japanese) 'Dragonfly'...I can see why,what a great name!
