Home Gudgeon and gist Language Log "Protein" in Chinese and Japanese

"Protein" in Chinese and Japanese

Language Log 2024-07-27

[This is a guest post by Nathan Hopson]

I recently received the following delightful question from Hilary Smith (University of Denver) about the origins of the term for protein in Chinese (dànbáizhì) and Japanese (tanpakushitsu). Thanks to her for pointing me down this lovely rabbit hole!

The hanzi/kanji used are identical (蛋白質), though in written Japanese the term is often タンパク質 or たんぱく質 because the 蛋 character is not one of the “regular use” kanji (常用漢字 jōyō kanji) selected by the officially announced by the Japanese education ministry for mastery during compulsory education.

Hilary wrote that she had circumstantial evidence from some extant texts that, like a lot of other technical vocabulary, this word was coined in Japan to translate a European term in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. That language, she suspected, was German. In German, the word is Eiweiß, which breaks down to Ei (egg) weiß (white). This is a perfect match for the Sino-Japanese term’s first two characters; the third means “stuff” or “substance.”

Hilary asked if I could confirm the German origin and comment on the date of coinage in Japanese. The answer turned out to be a fascinating train of translation with a detour into (and immediately away from) testicular imagery.

The standard answer to the origins of 蛋白質 in Japanese is provided by the Nihongo daijiten (“Great Japanese Dictionary” 日本国語大辞典), last edited in 1995. The dictionary cites Shiba Ryōkai’s (司馬凌海 1839-1879) 1862 七新藥 (Shichi shin’yaku, “Seven new medicines”) as the oldest extant use of the term 蛋白質. That comes in a passage describing protein binding:

「…蛋白質と相結合して以て其功を発す」

…tanpakushitsu to aiketsugō shite, motte sono kō o hassu

Roughly: “[It] binds with protein and thereby has its effect”

In digging just a little further I came across an article by Shiba Tetsuo (芝哲夫) that uncovers evidence of the term used a year earlier, in 1861, by Kawakami Kōmin (川本幸民 1810-1871). Kawakami was the translator to Japanese of Julius Adolph Stöckhardt’s (1809-1886) Die Schule der Chemie (“School of Chemistry”), a highly influential text first published in 1846. It went through over twenty editions and was widely translated. Thus far, the German origins hypothesis for 蛋白質 was holding up well, though the date of origin was pushed back far beyond not just the texts Hilary had access to, but even a year past its canonical coinage.

However, Kawakami was not working directly from German. Japan had centuries of skill and knowledge working from Dutch texts (via Rangaku 蘭学, or “Dutch learning”), and Kawakami was a veteran scholar of the Dutch learning. He therefore turned to an existing Dutch expanded translation by Jan Willem Gunning, De scheikunde van het onbewerktuigde en bewerktuigde rijk: bevattelijk voorgesteld en met eenvoudige proeven opgehelderd: derde Nederduitsche uitgave van Stöckhardt’s Schule der chemie (“The chemistry of the organized and unorganized kingdom… 3rd. ed. of Stöckhardt’s Die Schule der Chemie”). Kawakami’s multi-volume translation was published as化学新書 (Kagaku shinsho, “New book of chemistry”). Therein, he used the term 蛋白質 to translate the Dutch “eiwit,” which is structurally identical to the German Eiweiß.

The remaining mystery, which Shiba addresses, is why Kawakami elected to use the glyph 蛋. In Japanese, “egg” (tamago) can be written multiple ways, including with the single character 卵. Other than in the compound 蛋白質, the 蛋 character is rarely seen outside of Chinese restaurant menus in Japan today because it is not incuded in the jōyō kanji. I won’t speculate on the chicken-and-egg causality problem of whether it fell into disuse and was removed from the list or whether removal from the list is what made it fall out of use. It is enough to say that the 蛋 character is unusual these days. Shiba speculates that Kōmin chose 蛋 for ei rather than 卵 because the latter character visually references testicles whereas 蛋 unambiguously means bird eggs. For those interested, the original passage is:

「蛋白」のオランダ語はeiwitで直訳すると卵白であるが，幸民はなぜ…「蛋」の字をこれに充てたのであろうか。卵は象形文字としてみればわかるように，これは男性の性器を表わす意味がある。幸民はそれを嫌ったのであろうか，鳥のタマゴを意味する。「蛋」を採用して「蛋白」とした… (708-709)

To sum up, we have a German text translated and elaborated into Dutch that was then translated into Japanese. A rather literal translation of “egg white” (Eiweiß/eiwit) as “egg white substance” (蛋白質) yielded the Japanese term that was then imported into written Chinese and given a sinified pronunciation. Also, we avoided male gonads.

 

Selected readings