11/4/2023 0 Comments Serenity meaning greekEtymonline also notes that this particular moon goddess name also gives English the term selenian, “of or pertaining to the moon as a world,” as well as the element name selenium and selenographer, “student of the moon.”Īnyway, I think there’s a tendency to look at the way Japanese processes English’s R and L sounds as either bad or funny or both, but I thought this was a nice instance in which the phenomenon actually gave added depth and meaning. Selene, meanwhile, comes from the Greek selas, “light, brightness, bright flame, flash of an eye,” going back to the Proto Indo-European root *swel-, “to shine, beam,” which is related to the English words swelter and sultry. Lusaris, The Goddess of Serenity, is famed for two things: returning things that have been forcibly altered from their natural states and for granting. The Latin word in turn comes from the Proto Indo-European root *ksero-, “dry,” which is also the source of the Greek xeros, “dry,” from which we get words such as xeriscaping, which is the practice of growing plants without irrigation. In Japanese, Serena (and by extension, Serenity) could work as just another variation on the moon goddess’s name but in English it doesn’t work nearly as well: The name Serena, like the English adjective serene, come from the Latin serenus, meaning “peaceful, calm, clear, unclouded,” and by extension also “cheerful, glad, tranquil” - which is to say nothing explicitly moon-related. Selena, Selina and Selene are all related feminine names that exist today, but the name the dub of Sailor Moon doesn’t use any of those. This results in some bad stereotypes about people from certain Asian countries speaking English as a second language, but it also results in wordplay that works in Japan but is slightly less successful in an English-speaking region.Īmong the various moon deities namechecked by characters in the Sailor Moon’s orbit are Luna, Artemis, Diana and Selene - the last of which is the Greek equivalent of Luna. Moon-themed names abound with characters related to her, and because Japanese has just the one liquid consonant, English’s two liquid consonants - represented by the letters R and L - get conflated. ![]() You see, Usagi/Serena is also the superhero Sailor Moon, and Serenity is queen of the moon. Chaos In Greek mythology, Chaos was the dark abyss from which everything came-a beginning point, not a place of refuge. The beginning of primary school marks the beginning of a brief period of serenity for most parents. ![]() The name makes sense, more or less, because in the show this character eventually discovers that she is the reincarnation of one Queen Serenity, but what’s interesting about this choice is that it has a double meaning in Japanese that doesn’t exactly carry over into English. ![]() When the show originally broadcast in the U.S., the English dub replaced a lot of Japanese names with ones someone thought would be friendlier for western audiences, and included among those was the main character: Usagi Tsukino became Serena Tsukino in that first American dub. One show that we covered recently was the anime Sailor Moon. Because I have a podcast about TV, I end up going down some rabbit holes relating to series that have a lot of episodes or just have a strong following.
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