Re: 'Stallion' in Japanese

On Friday 05 March 2004 12:32 pm, Douglas Koller, Latin & French wrote:
> Henrik writes:
>
> >They are stallions, the former possibly being an adult,
> >the latter a young one.  According to Unihan.txt, the former is
> >pronounced 'fu4' in Mandarin (just like 'father'), the latter either
> >'er2' or 'ni2' or 'pai4' or 'po2'.
>
> You've exhausted my resources. The "fu4" you discuss is not included
> in any dictionary I have (and I have a few). "Er2" only occurred in
> one Hakka dictionary. "Bo2" *looks* like your "fu4" charcter, but is
> quite in common currency as meaning "refute" or "retort", or
> "variegated", but it's not the same character.
>
> >(Maybe 'tane uma' is Japanese for something like 'stallion', but I'm
> >searching for a single character word.)
>
> "tane" means "seed"? So it's weird. The characters you've profferred
> are so esoteric, that it's doubtful I could pull Japanese readings
> out of them from any resource I have.
>
> Sorry, dude,
>
> Kou
>
"Seed horse" sounds vaguely Victorian in English. Like someone trying to
indicate the difference between a stallion and a gelding without admitting
they know what the difference is. Or just indicating breeding stock rather
than working stock.

I remember reading  a complaint that official Japanese dictionaries contain a
lot of made-up scholarly terms for livestock and agricultural items that are
unrelated to the true native vocabulary that was historically used by the
peasants.

Japanese is less obsessively gender-focussed than IE languages, so they may
not have individual words for things like stallions vs mares, just horses
which are they described in more detail if the context makes it necessary.
--
Elyse Grasso

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