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No, shiitake. It was missing an i.
by cynix 4y ago
No, shiitake. It was missing an i.
- hvdijk 4y agoNo, it wasn't. Merriam Webster includes shitake as a less common but valid spelling. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shitake https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shitake
- bluejekyll 4y agoThis reminds me of a professor who while reviewing a paper of mine, circled a word in red ink and said “not a word”. So I brought in my dictionary and pointed to the word, and said see? They then told me that Merriam-Webster is shit, and I should be using the American Heritage dictionary: https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=shitake+&submit.x=0&submit.y=0 https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=shitake+&sub...
- hvdijk 4y agoI wonder what your professor's opinion on OED is. It includes shitake. https://www.lexico.com/definition/shiitake https://www.lexico.com/definition/shiitake (note the "also shitake")
- anigbrowl 4y agoThat's just institutionalized mediocrity, it's only valid because enough people spell foreign words poorly that you just have to deal.
- colejohnson66 4y agoThe dictionary’s job is to describe you how words are used, not prescribe definitions.
- anigbrowl 4y agoUnfortunately it is often cited for the latter purpose.
- hvdijk 4y agoDo you have any support for your position that that is a poor spelling? There are multiple ways in active use of transliterating Japanese. One of them involves writing shi+i as shii to produce shiitake, which is then left as is. Another one of them involves writing shi+i as shī to produce shītake. As ī involves a marker English does not have, it gets dropped when used in English. Both make sense.
- omoikane 4y agoAt this point, we should probably acknowledge that "shitake" is a common accepted variant of "shiitake", just like how most of the world uses "Tokyo" even though it should be "Toukyou".
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cynix 4y agoAt least there’s a good reason behind Tokyo, since it’s meant to be Tōkyō but the diacritic was dropped because it’s hard to type. What’s their excuse for dropping a perfectly typable i?
- pessimizer 4y agoBecause double "i"s don't mean anything in English orthography, and at best serve as reminders of a sound you've heard somewhere else? The name for that mushroom is not from a Roman script. It is translated into one in various ways, official and unofficial, devised by arbitrary missionaries. Once it becomes an English word, it's nice if it is respelled in a way that we can easily pronounce, although it's against our nature as Americans not to just leave it obscure and look down on people who aren't in the know. British people will happily mangle a word to make it an English word, especially if it's French, but they really should be tried for what they do to the word "jaguar." Americans are more insecure, I guess, due to youth.
- comradesmith 4y agoIsn’t that the same justification for Shitake vs Shiitake? In Japanese it would be kanji or occasionally hiragana, some transliterations will be imperfect, and so long as the authors intent is clear, to me that’s all that matters