I was aware that I was spelling it differently than it had previously been transliterated. However, when I listen to the native language pronunciation, it sounds more like “Yae” than “Yue”. Therefore, I believe my transliteration more accurately represents the older name.
Edit: I looked up what the Pinyon is, and that’s where the “Yue” spelling comes from. Turns out “yuè yuè fěn” is the Pinyon spelling for “月月粉.” That would explain why you can find it simplified into “Yue Yue Fen.” However, that isn’t transliteration. “Yae Yae Fen” would be transliteration though, because it’s putting it into an English language spelling. “Yue Yue Fen” is just an improperly written version of “yuè yuè fěn” and does not convey the pronunciation when pronounced in English.
I am a native Mandarin speaker, and the vowel in 月 sounds nothing like ae to me. We all perceive and interpret sounds differently though.
On second thought though, someone with a strong Hokkien accent would pronounce it closer to yeh.
On third thought, there is a lot of dialectal variation in Mandarin, so it’s also possible some speakers pronounce it closer to what you hear.
If the point is to use a name that is connected to the “original” name of a plant and recognizable by the greatest number of people, wouldn’t it make sense to use a standardized romanization system that is used by, or at least recognizable to most Chinese speakers? No, Yue Yue Fen does not include tone diacritics, but for better or for worse, leaving off diacritics and non-English letters has become the convention for cultivar names in the US (and probably most of the rest of the English speaking world). E.g. 太秋 is romanized as Taishu, not Taishū, we write Gruß an Aachen as Gruss an Aachen, 山西李 is Shanxi Li, not shānxī lǐ.
Romanizing the u in yue as an a is not only incorrect from a pinyin perspective, but the combination of ae doesn’t exist in Mandarin and the resulting Yae Yae Fen looks wrong to a Chinese speaker that is familiar with romanization. If not for the Fen, I would assume I am looking at a Japanese cultivar like Yaezakura.
An interesting thing happens with names that are polish in origin, like some varieties of cornelian cherries. unlike Chinese, Polish uses the same alphabet English does. However, the letters the sounds make are very different often (przybylski is pronounced shubilskee) which has led me to see and assume a lot of plants with very similar names to be the same variety.
What’s even more interesting to me is when plants go from Japan to China to Korea via whatever method. I’d assume the meaning is kept but not the pronunciation but I’m not sure
I think this is a decent idea but can only be taken so far before it really starts breaking down. There are a lot of phonological features that simply do not exit in English, and even within the original language, there will be variations in how to pronounce something. GrapeNut’s post touched on that.
Whenever something is brought into the English language, the pronunciation will be altered, either immediately or over time, to English phenomes, no matter how hard people try to preserve the “correct” pronunciation. Even outside of cultivar names, with words that highly educated speakers deem very important to pronounce “correctly” they generally get it wrong and the word morphs into English pronunciation. The best recent example is the pronunciation of the city that’s now spelled in English as Kyiv. Traditionally, the English pronunciation is loosely based on Russian-language name of the city, but in recent years there was a concerted effort to “switch” to the Ukrainian-language name of the city, and now journalists and politicians generally say “keev” instead of “kee-ev.” Thing is, the “updated” pronunciation with a single long vowel and a consonant ending is still nothing like the “correct” pronunciation, which is “kɪjiu̯,” two syllables not one, and it’s a long vowel and then a palatal and then an uncommon diphthong ending in a vowel that doesn’t exist in standard English. Ironically, the new English pronunciation is arguably closer to modern Russian pronunciation than the old one even was. Even with actual Ukrainians to coach them, highly educated native English speakers who literally went to the city still get the name completely “wrong.”
But it all just goes back to the problem of prescriptive linguistics. You can’t just propose a rule that language has to follow and impose it on people. Try as grammarians did for hundreds of years, sentence-final prepositions was just not something they could root out. Or move away from. We can make all the dictionaries in all the world say that the English pronunciation of Kyiv (actually Київ) is “kɪjiu̯” but it won’t make one iota of difference, because we’re still just trying to force people to speak a certain way. Linguistics can’t do that, it can only describe how people speak (I personally somewhat disagree, I think linguistics can to some extent be prescriptive and not just descriptive, but professional linguists probably all strongly disagree).
At the end of the day, we can make a degree of effort to localize names, so we might try and convince people to say “kee-yew” or something, but we’ll still be fighting against the way people are used to saying and writing something, ie trying to prescribe language. And we of course can give precedence to historic names and pronunciation, so we could go back and find the oldest English name, in which case it’s Kiev and pronounced kee-ev. Or we could try and determine the original name and ignore newer names, in which case we’ll have to come up with some way of localizing *kyjevъ.
To be honest though, it all seems pretty arbitrary, and which method for determining the “correct” name seems to just depend on the preferences of the person trying to change how other people call things. And it’s not like we can just settle on a single method, because there will always be cases in which people will have legitimate reasons for now wanting to use that method. And we can try to get people to use English language sounds that are closer to the root, but it’s just not a winning strategy to try and get people to memorize the phenomes and phonology rules of multiple of languages so they pronounce col de dame and yangmei and taishu and shirokolistvennyi correctly, in much the same way that it’s not a winning strategy to try to convince people to use the correct pronunciation of all the Middle English words that were borrowed into modern English, words like: wordes that weren borowid into moder Englysh.
Oh, one nitpick about col de dame. The vast, vast majority of English speakers, even those who studied French, will say col de dame wrong. English phonology has two forms of the L sound, the normal one and the apical voiced velarized alveolar approximant, ɫ aka dark l that’s common in word-ending positions, especially after vowels. That sound does not exist in French, but in the same way that native German speakers unconsciously devoice the endings of words (“of vorts”), native English speakers will pretty much always says “koɫ de” which incorrect.
Well, incorrect according to the rules of French. But when I say, “I am growing a col de dame” I’m not speaking French, I’m speaking English, and the English rule is to use ɫ.
Don’t know much about it, no expert. But I’d say if someone discovered a tree or made the tree by biotech or however they make varieties, then they have the rights to name it. Or maybe the original name it went by.
appreciate your feedback. However, I want to stress that although Pinyon uses modified Roman alphabet in place of Chinese characters, it is not in fact transliteration. The point of transliteration is to get the speaker of the language a word is transliterated into to be able to pronounce that word as accurately as possible based on their reading of it without prior understanding of the original language. Writing in Pinyon is NOT writing in English. An English speaker trying to read Pinyon without prior training for how to read Pinyon would do a very poor job at pronunciation.
Emphasizing my point, it’s not supposed to look right to a Chinese speaker because it’s not been written in a Chinese language (Pinyon in this case). It’s written so that an English speaker, not trained in any Chinese language can look at the spelling and pronounce it as close as possible to the original.
I think the problem with this conversation is that everyone is saying valid things, but they aren’t all related to transliteration. Many languages (including examples made by individuals here) use variations of the Roman alphabet. However, it’s only transliteration if we write the words using the version of the Alphabet used by the language being transliterated to.
An English speaker with no knowledge of Chinese is going to do a very poor job at pronouncing anything in Chinese regardless of how it’s written. There are too many sounds that don’t occur in English (the vowel in yue, all the retroflex consonants, contrast between aspirated and unaspirated consonants (did you know Mandarin lacks b, d, and g?) not to mention the tones. There is simply no combination of letters in our alphabet that can replicate all of those sounds. The best we can do is approximate them. For example, using b for the unaspirated p in Beijing since English speakers can’t distinguish between the sounds.
But more to the point of this thread, I don’t think it’s particularly relevant how an English speaker pronounces a cultivar name. The majority of Americans don’t pronounce Spanish or French cultivars names correctly anyway, let alone names of cultivars from Slavic languages. The point of writing is to communicate across distance and time, and the point of using a common cultivar name is to make sure more people know which plant you are referring to. Bonus points for a name that has a direct connection to the “original” name, whatever language it was in.
So why not use a standard system for rendering non-Latin script if it already exists for that language? A Spanish speaker, a German speaker, and an English speaker are going to transliterate the same Chinese word three different ways at least, according to the phonetic restrictions of their respective languages whereas using pinyin to render a Chinese word into the Latin alphabet ensures contiguity across many languages.
You make good points. I will update my records to use the Pinyon name for documenting this rose (in addition to including the original Chinese characters), and will list the English transliteration after as a pronunciation guide. Of course I’ll still document the various newer names it has in English as well so I can tie them all together.
I remember reading a long time ago it was supposed to be a sport of a BT. But I take almost everything in the fig world with a grain of salt today. Can’t wait for the future of better and less expensive testing.
People misuse the term “sport” frequently. I believe it’s because so many people in the fig community don’t have a horticultural background and so don’t understand the terminology they’re using.
Definitely don’t have the knowledge or wisdom as you or the OP. But it’s my understanding that a sport is a mutation or a morphological change from one part of the tree.
I have seen a lot of people will call albino or variegation a sport I’m not sure about that since other factors like viruses can induce those changes and are probably unstable, or a BNR or any striped fig that hasn’t reverted.
I would consider a tree that bears a reddish colored fruit like a Brown Turkey then one branch produced a yellow/green/purple fig like the Olympia and you propagated the Olympia and the tree stayed the same with stable genetics and attributes then that would be considered a sport. Different growth, vigor and leaf.
I would say you have the right idea about what a sport is, but I would include variegation if it’s chimeric (where a layer of tissue becomes albino) as opposed to just virus infected.
Where I’ve seen “sport” misused most is for plants that very clearly originated as a seedling, self sown in the mother plant. I say “very clearly” because they often differ from the parent in multiple ways. It would be unusual (though possible) for a sport to differ in multiple ways from the original since it would require multiple phenotypic mutations to occur all at the same time in the same growing point. This is less of a problem in large woody plants where it’s clear to see the sport is attached to the original tree, but I’ve seen it in various perennials where it can be hard to verify if the so called “sport” (often just a seedling) actually ever was connected to the original.
I’ve also seen “sport” used to describe similar varieties when non-horticultural people try to wrap their heads around how multiple varieties could be similar, yet still justify different names. This one is particularly inappropriate because those similar varieties may or may not even be closely related (figs masquerading under the name “Brown Turkey” are the prime example).
