Re: USAGE: Dinos and dragons

From: "Danny Wier"

> --- John Cowan wrote:
> > There is something very cool about the fact that the -saur in the
> > English
> > names of dinosaurs is translated into Chinese by long2, dragon.
>
> Japanese too.  In the SNES version of the RPG game Final Fantasy III
> (actually VI), two of the baddest monsters in the game are dinosaurs (a
> T. Rex and a Brachisaurus), but one of the incidental characters speaks
> of "terrible dragons in a northern forest" or something like that.  He
> was talking about the dinosaurs, as the Japanese term for the great
> reptiles of ages past translates literally to "fearsome dragons".
Well, "kong3long2" is the generic term for dinosaur in Chinese (I imagine
"kyooryuu" in Japanese), "terrifying dragon". But, really, ain't this just a
calque (dino-terrifying, saur-lizard)? I'm not a native speaker, but I
imagine directly calquing "lizard" would be weird due to size implications.
Run for your lives -- terrifying killer newts!!

> And that makes me wonder if the dragons of world mythologies (and
> similar beasts such as Quetzalcoatl or Leviathan) aren't actually
> expressions of a knowledge of the dinosaurs...
To my knowledge, dragons are awesome, though beneficent in Chinese culture.
The Chinese call themselves "long2 de chuan2ren2", "special people of the
dragon". Tradition has it that it's made of the feet of a chicken, the body
of a this, the head of a that, and so on. One theory I heard though can't
confirm is that the dragon is a symbolic representation of storm rain. To a
rice culture (isn't there a special word for this as "sericulture" is to
silk, I forget), major rains are a good thing, so there's your beneficence.
To the West, not so good, hence the representation as a fire-breathing,
malevolent force.

It might also be useful to look at an etymological Chinese dictionary. In
the modern character "long2", we can see the characters "stand",  "moon",
and something which could be interpreted as dorsal scales or feet on a
creature. Needless to say as I've just shown in my own fly-by-night
analysis, without a genuine Chinese etymological expert on the characters,
this sort of game can get very Rorschach testy around the edges (wait, wait,
I think I see a head here...).

Kou