[LMB] OT: Tautological placemames!

[Agnes Charrel-Berthillier]

Doctor Nightfall wrote:
> 
>> I'm sure someone here will be able to correct me if I'm
>> wrong, but I was once told that "yama" means mountain in
>> Japanese. So Mount Fujiyama is redundant. It is like saying
>> Mount Fuji Mountain.
>>
>> Christine
> 
> I believe that that is corrrect. BUT, and this is a very big but, 
> Japanese has several homonyms... including, I;'ve heard, one that sounds 
> the same as the word for Mountain, but I cannot remember for the life of 
> me what it was! I will check with a friend, a fluent Japanese speaker. :)

Christine is correct. Although the character for mountain is pronounced 
san rather than yama in that specific case.

So Japanese people refer to the mountain as Fuji-san (which translate as 
Mount Fuji), some Westerners call it Fuji-yama, which then gets made 
redundant as Mount Fuji-yama.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Fuji for the details.


Agnes