Arugula
Wade Cartwright
April 22, 2011, 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!
bababardwan
April 22, 2011, 11:58 AMhttp://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/芝麻菜
cinnamonfern
April 22, 2011, 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.
orangina
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
"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.
John
April 22, 2011, 06:04 AMHa, my wife loves arugula. In Chinese it's 芝麻菜.