胡萝卜 or 红萝卜 for carrot?

Are you doubting the wisdom of the ancients!?!

I mean he is not talks about a vegetable of 萝蔔.220px-Carrots_of_many_colors

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Stop…you’re making me hungry.

I just try to understand which one is a correct name of carrot.

Maybe I’m mishearing or misremembering, but once in a while when I show students videos of carrots (e. g., carrots lying in baskets, being pulled up in a garden, being boiled in a pot), I think I hear a student say, simply, 蘿蔔, without 紅 or 胡.

But I’m prepared to abandon that seeming recollection if it seems unlikely to the rest of you, all of whom certainly know Chinese far better than I do. :slight_smile:

Without 紅 or 胡, just simply say 蘿蔔 would most likely incur the image of a radish than a carrot.

胡 implies that carrot was an foreign import. It was introduced to Chinese around the 13 century, and didn’t make its way to Japan until the 16 century.

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So the 胡 in 胡蘿蔔 doesn’t refer to this 胡, this 胡, or this 胡, but instead it just means 國外, or something like it?

Just asking. I’m 'way out of my depth here, so I’ll accept whatever answer you give.

The 胡 were people who lived beyond the borders…so the character evolved to mean “from beyond the borders.”

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胡’s meaning really depends on the time period. For example, for 胡國, which was coined during middle stages of the Zhou dynasty, the Huns weren’t really a thing then.

From the Warring states period onward, for a while 胡 just meant the Huns.

For a long time 胡 meant both foreign and from the Asian steppes. When South East Asian sea trade reached China around the end of the Han dynasty, then 胡 shifted more to just mean people or things from the Asian steppes.

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Next up: “European wind protection.”

(Just kidding.)

Of course the carrot is a kind of luobo, just like the whale is a kind of yu. The trouble starts when we try to make these things fit into a non-Chinese paradigm.

Somewhere in the world, right now, I bet there’s an argument about why English speakers think peanuts are nuts (or peas).

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No one thinks that. Are you kidding?

Exactly! And even in ancient times, there were no carrots on the Earth Moon.

Or were there? :thinking:

Mythology-illustration-Life-on-the-Moon5

Are you?

Peanuts are a food with an identity crisis. While most people think of peanuts as nuts, they are actually legumes. What is a legume? It is a type of plant with seeds that grow inside pods such as peas or beans. Unlike nuts, which are grown on trees, peanuts grow underground. Peanut seeds flower above ground and then migrate underground to reach maturity. They are removed from the ground during harvesting. Peanuts are also called goobers, goober peas, groundnuts, earthnuts, monkey nuts, and grass nuts.

While we’re at it…

Many insects commonly known as “bugs” belong to other orders; for example, the lovebug is a fly,[6] while the May bug and ladybug are beetles.[7]

Some authors draw a distinction in writing the common names of insects. True flies are in their view best written as two words, such as crane fly, robber fly, bee fly, moth fly, and fruit fly. In contrast, common names of non-dipteran insects that have “fly” in their names are written as one word, e.g. butterfly, stonefly, dragonfly, scorpionfly, sawfly, caddisfly, whitefly.[2] In practice, however, this is a comparatively new convention; especially in older books, names like “saw fly” and “caddis fly”, or hyphenated forms such as house-fly and dragon-fly are widely used.[3] In any case, non-entomologists cannot, in general, be expected to tell dipterans, “true flies”, from other insects, so it would be unrealistic to expect rigour in the use of common names. Also, exceptions to this rule occur, such as the hoverfly, which is a true fly, and the Spanish fly, a type of blister beetle.

As for the carrot and the radish, scientists tell us they’re both eudicots, but the former is an asterid, while the latter is a rosid. I suppose that makes them as closely related as, say, the human and the platypus.

Yeah. Just trying to start an argument :clown_face:

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Last time I bought a can of mixed nuts, there were peanuts in it. Case closed.

Was there any salt in it?

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