Arugula
Wade Cartwright
April 22, 2011 at 05:01 AM posted in General DiscussionMy Chinese tutor and I have had ZERO luck finding the Chinese term for arugula, also known as rocket plant or more formally as Eruca sativa. I know this is very abstruse, but can anyone help? Would be much appreciated. Thanks!
cinnamonfern
April 22, 2011 at 03:53 PM
"Variety is the status quo in nature, people like to standardize. " That is very true. Let me see if I can find a picture...nope. One of my profs for a class is a potato breeder. He had a fantastic rainbow picture of potato varieties. I can't find it. This will have to do.
orangina
April 22, 2011 at 03:00 PM
Some rhubarb is yellow. The store I used to work at sold rainbow rhubarb, which had stalks ranging from yellow to almost purple in the same bunch. We sold carrots of various colors as well. At first I was a little upset about people always having to breed for something new and exciting... then I learned that the traditional orange color is the result of selective breeding, not all the other colors. Variety is the status quo in nature, people like to standardize.
What I want to know is what arugula has to do with sesame... since that is what comes up in my dictionary for 芝麻sans菜.
cinnamonfern
April 22, 2011 at 12:15 PMThis is a good tip - if you can't find something in the dictionaries, try reverse searching wikipedia. What I mean is, look it up in English, and then switch to the Chinese translation using the sidebar.
I did this to show my Chinese friends what rhubarb was. It's from China so I knew they had to know what it was! Turns out it's called 大黄. I think that's a funny name - it's not even yellow - it's red.
I've also used http://www.dictall.com/ to find some really odd words (like 黄麻) I needed translations for and couldn't find anywhere - I think it correlates Chinese journal titles with their English translations.