|
Birds of East Asia & Mainland Southeast Asia Glossary of Species Names in Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese |
||
| site search |
|
Birds of East Asia & Mainland Southeast Asia Glossary of Species Names in Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese |
||
| site search |
The impetus for the creation of this glossary was the idle discovery that bilingual dictionaries don't provide a satisfactory Vietnamese equivalent for the word 'petrel'. Both Chinese and Japanese have a term meaning 'sea swallow', but when it came to Vietnamese, the dictionaries at my disposal only led into a wilderness of mirrors. The more I looked, the more confused I became.
Eventually I found that most dictionary translations are red herrings; Vietnam doesn't have any petrels and therefore no accepted term for them. The matter should have rested there.
To my misfortune, it was not to be. Having gathered material in the three languages, my interest had been fatally piqued. Bird names are a fascinating field in any language. Unlike other areas of vocabulary, one-to-one comparisons are easy to make because there is a single, relatively clear-cut standard -- the scientific nomenclature. A three-way comparison seemed an interesting exercise.
Delving further, I found that bird names were also a fascinating study in language standardisation. Standard national languages and standardised vocabularies as we know them are a product of the modern Western era. The creation of standard names for animal and plant species is a process that is still being played out around the world. Simple as it may sound, the creation of such a vocabulary is a complex matter. It involves the choice of a standard term from a number of candidates (including literary, colloquial, foreign, and dialect terms), the need for a coherent naming system, the influence of existing systems in other languages, the need to create new terms where none exist, and the need to compromise between popular usage and the scientific taxonomy.
The CJV languages are a unique example of standardization in action. All three share a common background as part of the Chinese cultural sphere, most obviously seen in the historical use of Chinese characters, but have shown different responses to Westernisation and modernisation. In the field of ornithology, there are both interesting parallels and considerable differences in the way names have developed. Chinese has two different standards, Mainland and Taiwan, providing a useful check on standardisation within a single language. Taiwanese usage is always there to show a different possibility - what might have been had the terminology developed differently.
