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Comment by forkLding | Hacker News Reader

Long or lóng is the pronunciation of dragon in chinese/mandarin chinese. You can google pinyin of dragon to check.

Long is not dragon. It was just forced upon the language because the dominance of the English culture and civilization.

http://blog.tutorming.com/expats/chinese-dragon-western-diff...

You might find Wikipedia a better source[0]. The etymology of the word dragon describes a giant serpent, very similar to what 龍 represents. Many different cultures have a creature like this, not just Chinese and English.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon

Not convincing to me. Lots of mythical creatures share with same animal roots. That does not make them the same or equivalent.

Westerners naturally identified the Chinese 龍 with dragons, and so did the Chinese in reverse. The people that were directly involved found them equivalent, which is what matters.

Keep in mind the « Westerners » were mostly Italian, not English, and that the Dragon in question was that of Saint George's iconography [1], a serpent with wings and quite often hair.

[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vitale_da_bologna,_s...

See, that's what serious discussion brings about. Now I am fully on board with the idea that dragon has a long cultural history and is appropriate to use on loong or 龙.

The sad part is that the down voting is plainly distasteful.

I hope people see the importance to maintain the right behavior pattern to enoucrage high quality discussion.

It must be the first few explorers made the connection and everyone just followed. The same with many things named by Westerners. I found many things are not equivalent due to culture differences, but there is no way to translate if you don't approximate it to something in the other culture. I am just surprised that a correction has not been proposed by Chinese.

I don't think this is due to the 'dominance' of English. The connection between Western and Chinese dragons is probably a lot older and goes back to the earliest contacts during the Middle Ages by European explorers (who weren't English in most cases).

Nowadays there's a relatively strict idea in Western fantasy art of what a dragon is supposed to look like, but that's a fairly new development.

You make it sound like Chinese dragons not having a separate word in English is somehow a nefarious plot when in reality it's just that people noticed that these creatures are pretty similar and used the same word to describe them. This happens all the time. I would say Westerners are fairly aware that a Chinese dragon is different from a Western one even if the same word is used.

I only did a cursory look on Chinese Wikipedia, but it seems like Western dragons are also referred to as 龍 in Mandarin. Is this also forced upon the West due to the dominance of Chinese culture and civilization?

Dragon and Long (loong) are two different thing. I am not sure why historically translators have made the connection between these two. Long is a god and Dragon is a monster. There is nothing similar between these two creatures.

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