Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2022 October 26

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October 26

Chinese Name for Meyer lemon

Meyer lemon states that the original Chinese name for this fruit is 香柠檬. Not very helpful if you don't know Chinese. A literal translation is needed ("fragrant lemon"?), but I don't feel qualified to add one. Can a Chinese speaker help out? Isaac Rabinovitch (talk) 01:29, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

The Chinese Wikipedia has an article 香柠檬, which states this is a common name for Citrus × bergamia and that the fruit originated in Calabria, Italy. So this is the Bergamot orange, not Citrus × meyeri. The Chinese Wikipedia also has an article on the Meyer lemon, 梅爾檸檬 (Méiěr níngméng, meaning literally "Meyer lemon").  --Lambiam 21:14, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

The article's reference for this confusion is "Tracy L. Kahn, Ph.D., curator of the Citrus Variety Collection at the University of California" [1] It does seem a bit odd that the Chinese name for this fruit is taken from an Dutch-American, Frank Nicholas Meyer, who found it in China in 1907. Alansplodge (talk) 21:43, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

According to footnote 4 of our article, the plant was cultivated in China as a decorative houseplant, not for the fruit. Possibly, there was a native name that was only used for the plant.  --Lambiam 13:55, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

Poking around online, and talking to native speakers, I ran into a more or less overwhelming consensus that the characters from the Chinese Wikipedia are what is used today. Unsurprisingly, I couldn't find a great English language source, but I found a decent Mandarin one and updated the page. PianoDan (talk) 22:17, 27 October 2022 (UTC)