Danbooru

Character name: Yamano Remon or Lemon?

Posted under General

I was wondering if whether the current Yamano_Remon is correct or is her name supposed to be "Lemon."

The character Yamano R/Lemon (山乃 檸檬) is from the series ano_natsu_de_matteru (English title: Waiting in the Summer). Sites like ANN list it as Remon and Crunchyroll is subbing her name as Remon, but I think it should also be pointed out her similarity to Morino Ichigo (森野 苺) from Onegai Teacher and Onegai Twins in appearance, personality, and VA. Ano_natsu_de_matteru's screenplay and original character designs were done by people who contributed to the character conceptional designs and scenario writing for Onegai_* series, and so it wouldn't be out of the question that when they designed Yamano that they also had her share the trait of being named after a fruit like Morino.

As I do not know Japanese, the best I can do is rely on mechanical translations, but the name 檸檬 does lead to the Lemon page on Japan's wikipedia and googling does result in images of products labeled "Lemon" in English as well as plenty of Lemon fruit pictures.

Just for completion sake, here is a audio clip of her self-introduction from episode 1.
http://www.divshare.com/download/16555804-15c (alternative direct download of file)

Updated by jxh2154

Tough question. Remon does mean lemon, but its etymology is weird. The pronunciation is borrowed from Western languages, but the kanji are borrowed straight from traditional Chinese and are otherwise unused in Japanese. It's not an example of ateji (Kanji used for pronunciation) because the Chinese reading of those characters is níngméng.

Personally, I'd support using the L when it's clearly a loan word, but I don't know if that's Danbooru policy or not. I can't find the policy about romanization, but I know there is one.

I don't think we've clearly defined policy in this case.

Katakana loans with the original meaning are always spelled properly from their source, but those for which kanji are used are rarer and not as clear.

I guess it depends on if we'd romanize 煙草 たばこ with a 'c' "tobacco", or with a 'k' "tabako". It's the same sort of situation where the characters were chosen for their semantics rather than their pronunciation. I believe this is also usually considered ateji, but it's not very common because they used it for only the very earliest borrowings.

(as an aside, this process of importing symbols for meaning while disregarding the original pronunciation is where all the native kun-readings for Kanji came from originally, though that's an even older and obviously very well established practice)

My inclination is to treat these words with pronunciations borrowed from their western sources as if they were Katakana and use the proper western spellings unless there has been some sort of semantic shift.

RaisingK said:
howto:romanize

Thanks. Not remember that was driving me nuts.

From the howto:

  • 魔法少女リリカルなのは → まほうしょうじょリリカルなのは → Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha. For foreign words like lyrical, follow the spellings of their respective source languages.
    • ランドセル → randoseru. As an exception to the above, loanwords whose semantics have changed in the borrowing process are often romanized as if they were Japanese.

This seems to fall under the first clause and not its exception. Basically, what Shinjidude suggested is the policy.

However, there are several other female names spelled れもん. (See. http://rut.org/cgi-bin/j-e/sjis/tty/dosearch?sName=on&H=PS&L=J&T=%82%EA%82%E0%82%F1&WC=none)

But only two of them mean Lemon, and this is one. (The other is the katakana version.)

BCI_Temp said:
Tough question. Remon does mean lemon, but its etymology is weird. The pronunciation is borrowed from Western languages, but the kanji are borrowed straight from traditional Chinese and are otherwise unused in Japanese. It's not an example of ateji (Kanji used for pronunciation) because the Chinese reading of those characters is níngméng.

Personally, I'd support using the L when it's clearly a loan word, but I don't know if that's Danbooru policy or not. I can't find the policy about romanization, but I know there is one.

It's also the Chinese equivalent of ateji. Or jièzì (http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%80%9F%E5%AD%97) The characters are chosen purely for their phonetic value. I'm a native Chinese speaker, and I grew up knowing that.

My Chinese loanword dictionary (汉语外来词词典, written by Liú Zhèngtán, which is often considered to be an authoritative source) also lists it as a loanword from English, on Page 259.

Note that Chinese has experienced a greater degree of phonetic shift over the years when compared to Japanese. A lot of old loanwords no longer quite sound like their original source. Similarly, note how "Peking" changed into "Beijing".

Also note that Japanese was once written entirely in Chinese characters at some point in the past, and some Chinese loanwords were actually derived from a term coined by the Japanese (entirely in Chinese characters, to boot). This gets rather interesting in certain cases; my Chinese loanword dictionary lists 混凝土 (concrete) as a Japanese loanword ultimately derived from English, but my Japanese loanword dictionary (宛字の语源辞典, written by Sugimoto Tsutomu) instead lists it as a loanword from Chinese! It's like both sides are trying to give the other the credit!

If you can read Chinese, this article (http://www.yywzw.com/stw/stw5-08.htm) provides for a rather informative read on Chinese-Japanese/Japanese-Chinese loanwords.

Shinjidude said:
I don't think we've clearly defined policy in this case.

Katakana loans with the original meaning are always spelled properly from their source, but those for which kanji are used are rarer and not as clear.

My inclination is to treat these words with pronunciations borrowed from their western sources as if they were Katakana and use the proper western spellings unless there has been some sort of semantic shift.

This sounds reasonable. Another instance similar to this is the usage of 倶楽部 (kurabu) for "club", although those kanji seem to have been chosen for the pronounciation. We have a couple of tags with "kurabu" in them.

Coming in late, but our position on this for personal named is that we kind of don't have one.

For the most part, if a foreign word is used, we use that word in its original, native language spelling. リリカル is lyrical, テスト is test, etc. These are usually no-brainers.

It's less clear when words have been adopted as personal names, because I'm sure we can come up with plenty of examples of words from other languages adopted into our language, but tweaked to match our spellings.

I think in this case... well I think it doesn't matter, but I'd say the argument for "Lemon" over "Remon" in AnoNatsu is slightly stronger than, say, the argument for "Poplar" over "Popura" in Working!!, because the latter is written in hiragana and was romanized as Popura by the author.

Has 檸檬's name been romanized in any official sources yet? This is one of those issues where it's close enough either way that I'd go with official romanization.

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