Talk:Savile Row

RFD discussion: October 2022–January 2023

 * See Category talk:en:Named roads.

Seiburo?
Can a Japanese editor confirm this?

– Jberkel 12:40, 23 January 2023 (UTC)


 * The author misspells the Japanese term -- it should be sebiro, with a short "e". Our entry is at 🇨🇬, but I notice now that it's missing some detail.
 * Numerous monolingual Japanese sources include mention of the derivation theory; by way of example, view the relevant page here in Kotobank (a monolingual Japanese resource aggregator website), and search the page for "savile".
 * That said, any direct connection to Savile Row is somewhat unclear, as described in the Japanese references I've looked in. The Nihon Kokugo Daijiten (NKD) is roughly analogous to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) only for Japanese, and according to the entry here, the term first appears in Japanese in 1870.  In the entry notes at the bottom of that entry, starting with, they lay out five initial theories:
 * literally "wide-backed" from the way there are no visible seams across the back of a suit jacket
 * meaning "wide over the back" as a rough translation of 🇨🇬
 * as a borrowing and shift of 🇨🇬
 * as a borrowing and shift of 🇨🇬
 * as a borrowing and shift of 🇨🇬, in reference to the wool used to make suits
 * The NKD entry states that the derivation is considered most likely.  This theory is mentioned as an equally-likely possibility alongside the  derivation in other monolingual Japanese dictionaries that I've looked into.
 * The NKD notes then continue to mention a work from 1860, the published by a Japanese philologist after traveling to San Francisco and reworking an English-Chinese dictionary for a Japanese audience.  Apparently the original Chinese included the character  in the translations of various English clothing terms, such as  for  or  for, appearing on page 51 of the PDF of the Japanese revised work.  That glossary lacks any entry for , however, and I see that there are two entries for different kinds of jacket further down that same page, and neither use the character .  The term  is glossed in Chinese characters as , which does not appear to be a Chinese word and is presumably a transcription of 🇨🇬.  By contrast,  appears to be a native Chinese term and not a transcription at all, from a basic sense of "(what one puts over one's) back (and) heart (i.e. chest)".  This could suggest then that the use of  in  is influenced by the Chinese term by analogy.
 * Personally, I suspect that may well be the actual derivation, with the Chinese-character spelling an example of phonetic and semantic ateji.  The term  as pronounced by a Japanese speaker would wind up as, not , and there is no clear mechanism or other apparent reason why shibiru would shift to sebiro.  Meanwhile,  would become sabiru rō or sebiru rō if borrowed from careful English enunciation, with the initial vowel's value depending on how closely the speaker pronounces the "a" in "Savile".  If from more casual and faster speech, where the final  in "Savile" and the initial  in "Row" are pronounced as less distinct individual sounds, "Savile Row" could indeed quite easily become sebiro in Japanese phonology.
 * HTH! ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 19:41, 23 January 2023 (UTC)