"Lewis Perin" > wrote in message

>and for those Japanese
> people who are interested in Chinese tea, why shouldn't they use
> Chinese characters to refer to them?[1]

They have no other characters anyway. That'd be too bad to get rid of the
meaning and keep only a phonetic reading.

> [1]Actually, I just thought of a reason why Japanese people wouldn't
> want to use Chinese characters: because, when using them in a Japanese
> context, the phonemes they correspond to wouldn't be the same as in
> Chinese.

Isn't that the same for the different Chinese dialects ?

On the first column, they give the kanji name (for Japan) of that tea. In
the second, they give the Japanese reading that are supposed to use (real
tea fans tend to know the pin yin actually used in China better than the
Japanese reading).
There is the possibility that some of the characters used in the first
column are only for the Japanese naming of that tea. One possibility is that
the Chinese original uses a more simplified or more complicated, and that
character is not of the list of kanji (characters used in Japan), so they
replace. Another is that they translated the Chinese meaning (here that
would be the *rolled* thing) into Japanese, with different characters.

> One thing, though, puzzles me about these Japanese sites for Chinese
> teas: some of the teas they list can only be found on Japanese sites.
> If a tea really is Chinese, why wouldn't it be retrievable on some
> Chinese site?

I have seen that many times. They obviously change certain names. And they
don't tell which...at the end the Japanese themselves believe that was the
original Chinese.
I suspect the pin yin of that list has been added later, using the automatic
character change of the computer.

Also, Chinese sites about tea tend to be more basic, give very little
information. Most of them are only made to sell tea. Probably fewer idle
amateurs have access to internet, compared with Japan.
In Japanese, there are many more pages that aim at sharing some knowledge,
then the on-line shop copy from them.... And you know what it's like on
internet. The first guy may have mispelled the name of a tea, 1000 others
copy the mistake and a new tea is invented. In this case, nobody says he/she
has had the tea you've picked.
All these Japanese sites are not selling that tea. They are listing all the
green teas they have ever heard about.

Kuri