Plant names in China

Introduction

What is called Chinese is usually Mandarin (see Wikipedia). There are many dialects in China, and even true languages, the diversity of which is masked by the use of an ideographic script which makes the same ideogram being spelled in very different ways in accordance to dialects. Many European plant names come from Cantonese (see Wikipedia), a language spoken on the coastal areas of China, very early visited by Europeans.

To this diversity, we must add that the transcription systems of Chinese used by Westerners have greatly varied. The result is that it is very difficult to know, when gathering graphically different words in written sources, whether we deal with really different words or simple graphical variants. The best thing to do is then to reproduce sources as they are, mentioning the source of each name.

Sources

• Fèvre, Francine & Métailié, Georges, 2005. Dictionnaire Ricci des plantes de Chine ; chinois-français, latin, anglais. Paris, Association Ricci - Editions du Cerf. 899 p. (see the publisher's page).
  • This book cannot be overlooked. It contains 16,500 plant names and 3,500 names from the materia medica. Its great interest is to give the names both in Chinese characters and in pin-yin (with diacritics), the entries being classified according to the Roman alphabetical order of pin-yin. This makes it usable by a non-sinologist. A great care has been given to the correct indication of plant scientific names, including cultivar names. Several indexes make the book easy to use. Finally, there are ethnobotanical notes on the various uses and the geographical distribution.