Dear Jiongtao,

Nice of you to explain cowry names in Japanese. The gender associated with these cowries
in your illustrated report are due to the obvious reasons.
If you take a look at any old Japanese shell books, you may realize that most cowry names
did not have "kai" or "gai" at the end and simply ended as "takara" or "dakara". It was in
the ealy 1970th that most Japanese shell books began to attach these extra words to make
them read as cowry-shell. Thus, "golden ring cowry" became "golden ring cowry-shell"
(that is, hanabira-dakara as Japanese name turned into hanabira-dakara-gai; the word
 "hanabira" stands for flower petals). Such a redundant naming is prevalent for many other
molluscs in Japan. I resent this stupidity to change many old established nice names into long
cumbersome and inconsistent names. Not beautiful at all. They used to value beauty in our words
in Japan but not any more, as far as the shell names are concerned.
By the way, do you know the story of "koyasugai" (a term for cowry shell in general)
that is believed in Japan to help ease baby birth of pregnant women?
Masashi Yamaguchi

-----Original Message-----
From:   Jiongtao HUANG [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
Sent:   Saturday, February 05, 2000 2:16 AM
To:     [log in to unmask]
Subject:        A Report on Japanese Names of Cowries

Dear Conchlers,

I wrote a report on "Japanese Names of Cowries".
If you have some interested in how does Japanese collectors
call "Neciocypraea Hirasei", ....., etc. Please try to review the
report from my site (^^)

http://www.soft.ics.keio.ac.jp/~huang/cgi-bin/seashells.cgi

Hope you can enjoy and fun.


-
Jiongtao
http://www.soft.ics.keio.ac.jp/~huang/
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