Names
Also known as the Chinese gooseberry, the fruit was renamed for export marketing reasons in the 1950s; briefly to melonette, and then later by New Zealand exporters to kiwifruit. The name "kiwifruit" comes from the kiwi—a brown flightless bird and New Zealand's national symbol. Kiwi is also a colloquial name for New Zealanders. The fruit had a long history before it was commercialized as kiwifruit, and therefore had many other names.
In Chinese, the word for most wild or local varieties of the kiwifruit is transliterated as the Macaque peach ( 獼猴桃 Pinyin: míhóu táo). The imported varieties are often referred to as wonderful fruit (奇異果 Pinyin: qíyì guǒ), the Chinese version of the original trademarked term kiwifruit. See the table below for other Chinese words for kiwifruit.
| Transliteration | Chinese |
|---|---|
| Macaque pear | 獼猴梨 Pinyin: míhóu lí |
| Vine pear | 藤梨 Pinyin: téng lí |
| Sunny peach | 陽桃 Pinyin: yáng táo |
| Wood berry | 木子 Pinyin: mù zi |
| Hairy bush fruit | 毛木果 Pinyin: máo mù guǒ |
In Japanese, see the table below.
| Transliteration | Japanese |
|---|---|
| Macaque pear | 猿梨 サルナシ sarunashi |
Read more about this topic: Kiwifruit
Famous quotes containing the word names:
“Shut out that stealing moon,
She wears too much the guise she wore
Before our lutes were strewn
With years-deep dust, and names we read
On a white stone were hewn.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
“Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“And even my sense of identity was wrapped in a namelessness often hard to penetrate, as we have just seen I think. And so on for all the other things which made merry with my senses. Yes, even then, when already all was fading, waves and particles, there could be no things but nameless things, no names but thingless names. I say that now, but after all what do I know now about then, now when the icy words hail down upon me, the icy meanings, and the world dies too, foully named.”
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)