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By Tom Wilkinson
Host and founder of Thinking in English, Tom is committed to providing quality and interesting content to all English learners. Previously a research student at a top Japanese university and with a background in English teaching, political research, and Asian languages, Tom is now working fulltime on bettering Thinking in English!
Tom, Great knowledge-expanding information.
As I learned from your article, the misnomer is an inseparable part of our languages. For every nationality or ethnicity, they are embracing a set of misnomers to expand their lingual skill and carry their culture on…
For example, in Chinese, we use “熊猫” for panda, it can be translated into English as “Bear Cat”, I don’t know why, maybe it seems like a bear, and behaves like a cat.
Speaking of the starfish, we call it “海星” in Chinese, which means “sea star” in English. It sounds a little bit vivid…
Probably, misnomers are based on some information sort of misunderstanding, though they are evidence of the language learning process in our history. Therefore, I am about to start to consider, we don’t have to be intimidated by making a new vocabulary in writing…😄
We actually can say “sea star” in English too!