Talk:Color Naming Rule/@comment-410526-20160901173103/@comment-410526-20160901211640

@Hazel: I'm fairly sure "May" didn't figure into the possible "derivation" of her name. The conclusion we reached last time around was this, more or less:


 * "Ze" is a corruption/misspelling of zǐsè (紫色) = "purple". You can drop the second part of zǐsè (紫色) when describing objects, so if you want to say "purple " it's just "zǐ ". So assuming they meant to say purple mushrooms, the error they made in the first half was a misspelling/mis-transcription, in spelling it "Ze" instead of "Zi".


 * "Dong" comes from dōng gū (冬菇) = "shiitake mushroom" or literally "winter mushroom". On its own, the dōng (冬) bit just means "winter". The part of that word that actually means mushroom is the second bit, gū (菇). It's similar to how watermelon is formed from two words, "water" and "melon".

To take that analogy further, it's as if they wanted to name her "purple melon" but instead named her "perpel water". That's the conclusion I reached, anyway. I based that off Google Translate and dimly remembered Chinese lessons from when I was a wee lad, so if any native speakers are hanging around they could probably shed some more light on this situation.

@SYUTK: "Mai" is pronounced more like "My" in Chinese. The sound of "May" would be spelled closer to "Mei", which has literally dozens of unrelated and probably contrary meanings, which I don't think we should go into here.

@Spirit: Very definitely my bad. I saw the name "Lisa Lavender", assumed it was free of speculation (because lavender, what more do you want?) and skipped over it without adding the speculative tag. I've removed the thing about the fish which I didn't think was relevant.