Talk:母艦

Etyl of 母艦#Japanese

Was this term actually coined in Japan, or was it borrowed from Chinese? I'm not having much luck with online resources, and my dead-tree library doesn't include etyls for many terms. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 03:30, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

It is perhaps most likely a Chinese and then Japanese calque for the English mother ship or the like. --KYPark (talk) 04:32, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

Oh, almost certainly a calque of English mothership. But which came first, the Chinese, or the Japanese? I know some common two-character terms were coined in Japan and later borrowed into Chinese (和製漢語), such as (deprecated template usage) 経済 or (deprecated template usage) 哲学, but I'm not sure if 母艦 is another such example. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 06:13, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

From the probabilistic perspective, I just assumed (1) "Chinese and then Japanese," (2) "calque," so that I do not deny the likelihood vice versa, 和製漢語. --KYPark (talk) 13:06, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

From what I could find out, to me, this term seems to be first coined in Japanese. I looked it up in 『日本国語大辞典 精選版』（小学館, 2006）, which claims to provide the oldest quotation for each entry. The dictionary attributed 母艦 to "九隻の母艦に搭載されている飛行機は" in Hiroyuki Agawa's『春の城』(1952). Another term 母国, with the same prefixing of 母, was attributed to "現代の英国「植民地と母国との関係」" in Bin Ueda's『思想問題』(1913). For the record, the dictionary often provides Chinese quotations when they preceded Japanese ones. (although, the Japanese editors might have missed to find precedences in Chinese literature.) Another indirect evidence is that, as noted, in the modern period there seems to be a good percentage of similar loan words from Japanese into Chinese. (see [1].)--Whym (talk) 15:29, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

Interesting, thank you Whym! I'll add this as the etymology then, qualifying with the word "probably". -- Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 15:55, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

• Actually, I just stumbled across some interesting and informative search results. I went over to Google Books to see about finding citation information for Agawa's book, and accidentally found some hits that are older still. Learning more about how Google's book search features work, I noticed they have an option to search for books by century, and clicking 19th century shows five hits at present here from the 1800s. This hit is from the book 聯合艦隊出征報告, which is a Japanese title from 1894. The two earlier Chinese hits from 1866 and 1871 are actually scannos, which is apparent if you click through to view the actual source text scans.

There's another Japanese hit from 1897 in a book by Makino Mamoru, but there's no scan, so I can't check. And the hit from 1895 in what appears to be a work translated into Japanese is actually another scanno, where the actual string is 英國艦隊, and Google's OCR algorithms misread the 國 character as 母.

So I'll use the 1894 work as the citation. Please update or change it as appropriate. -- Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 16:46, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, I'm happy to be corrected on the oldest use of the term. It's a pity that I cannot check it by myself because of what seems to be a regional lockout in Google Books. :( --Whym (talk) 21:43, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

Cheers! Though I am saddened and distressed by Google's apparent regional lockout. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 22:03, 22 June 2012 (UTC)