Ramen Lo Mein lou1 min6, part 2
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I encouraged Nathan Hopson to see the last sentence of the second comment here, "Ramen Lo Mein lou1 min6" (1/9/25), which reads: "We need Nathan Hopson / other Japanese lexicologists…".
Nathan replied with this guest post:
Ha! That's very flattering.
I can't claim to have a definitive answer to this, but Wikipedia seems to agree with my assumption — which also harkens back to our previous email about katakana + body lotion — that the contemporary prevalence of ラーメン as the preferred name and orthography for these noodles was fixed in place by the release of the first instant ramen in 1958, Nissin's "Chicken Ramen " (チキンラーメン) and all the products that followed.
If I understand correctly, previous names such as 支那そば (shina soba) were falling out of favor by this time for a convergence of post-imperial reasons: for some, 支那 had already become taboo, while for others there was a desire for a Japanese name for what had clearly become a Japanese food, origins notwithstanding. This also mitigated against the wide use of 拉麺. While it's not impossible even today to see these orthographic choices here and there, they are unusual (see Jim Breen's comments on the n-grams).
A final factor that cannot be ignored is that both visually and auditorily, ラーメン balanced well with チキン and with インスタント (insutanto), the katakana terms it was most associated via Nissin and its competitors. Sometimes it's good to have a contrast, but sometimes it's good to lean into the modern, international/cosmopolitan vibes of katakana.
Hope that makes sense
Selected readings
- "Ramen Lo Mein lou1 min6" (1/9/25),
- Pulled noodles: Uyghur läghmän and Mandarin lāmiàn" (8/8/14) — Some notes on the origins of the words and characters for wheat, flour, and noodles in Turkic and Sinitic languages
- "Greater China Co-Prosperity Sushi and Ramen Kitchen" (6/4/23)
- "Progress in the war on Chinglish" (12/3/17)
- "'And the greatest Japanese export to China is…'" (8/21/12)
Chris Button said,
January 13, 2025 @ 12:39 pm
I'm really curious where the word lā 拉 "pull" came from.
1. Schuessler's idea that it might be connected to tuō 拖 tʰa ← *ɬɐl "drag" as an "archaic colloquialism" is interesting. Middle Chinese la (from an earlier *rɐl) would have given luó (homophonous with 羅) though. So the tone shift presumably came after the Middle Chinese lap/ləp period that gave là.
2. The 撈 in "lo mein" should regularly be láo but is pronounced as lāo. Could that have influenced the lā of 拉, which should regularly be là? But then why would 拉 be used to mean "pull" in general and not just in reference to ramen?
3. Are Marc Miyake's observations (cited in earlier thread) about Sino-Japanese instead applicable to the Chinese source itself: "The rarer irregular -tu characters such as 拉 Kan'yô-on ratu 'break' (cf. EMC *ləp, Go rohu, Kan rahu, SK lap, SV lạp [laap]) contain relatively frequent irregular -tu characters as their phonetic elements. I suspect that the OJ period SJ codas *-p *-t *-k were neutralized as a glottal stop *-q (*[ʔ]) in rapid speech. This *q then merged with -t, the only other permissible final stop, which in turn merged with [tsu] after the seventeenth century (… cf. the variation between [ʔ] and [t] as a coda in modern English)."