i guess follow me @bethposting on bsky or pillowfort


discord username:
bethposting

bethposting
@bethposting

the Japanese word is a borrowing from Old Chinese 蜜 mit, which is a borrowing from proto-Tocharian (from an extinct branch of the Indo-European family found in western China). That means "mitsu" and "mead" are cognates.


0xabad1dea
@0xabad1dea

so, as many of y'all know, my paperwork name is Melissa. I am not fond of it, please don't call me that unless we're in front of normies, but it does happen to be the Greek word for Honeybee.

I needed to figure out what to call myself in Chinese characters, and I didn't want a haphazard three-character phonetic approximation of "Melissa". (Most Chinese personal names are exactly two characters and go together in some sort of vaguely sensical way.) I thought, "maybe I can find something that starts with the same sound..."

The Chinese spelling of Honeybee is 蜜蜂 - in Mandarin, "Mìfēng".

That's not just a convenient coincidence. It's cognate. I coincidentally have what may be the only typical traditional European name that has a proper cognate in Chinese...? (If you have any other examples, feel free to chime in! But I do not think native English "Lee" has any connection to Asian names with the same pronunciation.)

(I'm told 蜜蜂 sounds like a cute nickname rather than a proper paperwork name, but that's fine.)


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in reply to @0xabad1dea's post:

This is also one of those ones where I'd expect Japanese to have some kind of etymological connection, but it's only half true. "Mitsubachi" - "mitsu" is obviously connected, but "hachi" is from old Japanese rather than Chinese.