Son Goku, is one of the faces of the hero with thousand faces, IMO one of the greatest of all personification of the myth, from the perspective of someone from Latin America.
> Son Goku, is one of the faces of the hero with thousand faces
Son Goku from Toriyama is probably one of the best adaptation of the legend of Sun Wukong [1], one of my other favorites is Jan Kugo from Starzinger [2] and of course The Monkey from no other than the master Osamu Tezuka [3]
EDIT: it definitely also fits the definition that Campbell gives of the hero
孫悟空 is how it's written in both Traditional Chinese and Japanese. That's Son Gokū, as read in Japanese. For some reason it became Sangoku in France. While we're on names, did you know all names fell in themes. Vegetables for the saiyans (saiya-jin, vegetable in Japanese is yasai). Goku is Kakarot (carot), Vegita (vegetable), Raditz (radish), etc. Underwear: Bulma (bloomers), Trunks. Chinese(ish) foods: Yamcha (yumcha), Tenshinhan (tenshindon), Chaozu (jiaozi), and many more themes.
Instruments:
- Piccolo
- King Piccolo's children: Banjo, Bell, Mandolin, Maraca, Marimba, Conga, Cymbal, Drum, Harp, Organ, Piano, Tambourine, Ukelele
Colors:
- Red Ribbon Army: General Blue, Tao Pai Pai (桃白白 white), Colonel Brown, Colonel Silver, General White, Captain Dark, Captain Yellow, Colonel Viiolet, General Copper
Cinderella:
- Bibidi, Babadi, Buu
Devil/Satan:
- Mr. Satan
- Videl (anagram of Devil)
The vegetable link yeah I knew, the clothing too (they were a bit more obvious), but not saiya per se, nor the other food named chars.
side note, imported mangas were my entry-point to non European languages, I went into a deep rabbit-hole to decipher the Japanese writing system. And the pair trunks/dragon was my first seed to solve that, except I didn't really know how they were spelled there torankusu / doragonu so it took a little while to associate consonants with vowels.
I also didn't realise as a western kid that Dragon Ball is set in a Taoist / Buddhist universe. The way the gods, afterlife, etc work in Dragon Ball, the way you can get super powers through training is extremely related to buddhist / taoist mythology.
How?? The Monkey King is a trickster and quite frankly, mean to a lot of people. Goku is the exact opposite. The only thing they have in common is the extending rod that Goku would fight with as a child.
Watch the original episodes, he is very much like a trickster monkey. Then he matured into what people remember him as and became very different, but he didn't start that way.
The original Wukong [1] flies on a "golden cloud" (does that rings a bell?) and uses as a weapon a growing stick (Ruyi Jingu Bang, transliterated in Japanese as Nyoi Bo, the name used in the Dragon ball anime and manga) that obeys to voice commands
In Dragon ball the golden headband (that can shrink as a form of punishment) is missing, replaced by a regular red headband that sometimes Goku wears
EDIT: of course I forgot the most important one: Goku can become a monkey. Wukong is a monkey, the monkey king.
In Journey to the west Sun Wukong learns to behave and start following a path of spiritual growth and wisdom that, at the end of his journey, leads him to become enlightened and a Buddha himself.
Much like Goku in Dragon ball, where trough the training and by following his master's teachings, he becomes a warrior with a noble heart that values friendship over everything else.
After that, I agree, it's simply about becoming stronger and stronger.
I didn't watch the episodes, I read the 16th century book Monkey, translated into English by Arthur Waley. Supposed to be a pretty faithful translation, which is why I was surprised by your comparison of Sun Wukong and Son Goku.
> and quite frankly, mean to a lot of people
> Goku is the exact opposite.
How? How abandons his family to train or fight enemies. He puts everything at risk just for a good duel. He helps the enemy recover or throws his son out there just to see a good fight. Just because he's the MC and portrayed in a positive light...
He might be a popular character but definitely not nice.
Especially when you get into DragonBall super when he goes against what everyone is telling him to do and challenges super God to a fight, starting something that could have led to the death of multiple universes. And when he allows frieza to do whatever as long as it doesn't effect earth. He's very selfish in a lot of ways.
Are human beings responsible for changing how they use their own language? Or is just Word responsible for that?
Maybe MS Word is just changing things so fast that we are able to notice it, but the languages we use and the ways we comunicate have changed over time and will keep changing.
I think humans are easily influenced by programs that autocorrect/autocomplete grammar and spelling.
I notice a huge stylistic difference in articles written today compared to twenty years ago. There seemed to be much more variety and colorful language. Today, the trend is concise, simple sentences.
Red cabbage or Blue Cabagge, in northern Germany is also called red cabbage (Rotkohl), same color for some regions of Austria and Switzerland (Rotkraut).
In southern Germany it is called Blue Cabagge (Blaukraut).
If you ask people in Germany what the color of the vegetable is, they will answer "purple" (lila). There are some strange ways in the evolution of a language, depending on the region and events in the region.
It's normal, whatever normal means in this case, to think that a color is the same as a similar hue, in my example above, between red and blue you can find purple, violet "lilac" hues.
As a personal anecdote, the name for (orange) carrot in Southern Bavarian dialect is Gelberübe, Rübe for root vegetable and Gelb for yellow, also yellow is connected with orange in the brain and the language of the people.
A purple carrot has the honor to be called "lilane GelbeRübe", or purple yellow vegetable root in English.
Red cabbage is a bit of a weird example because its colour depends first on the acidity/basicity of the soil it was grown in, and then when you're using it on the acidity of other ingredients.
For example, if you cook it with apple (which is acidic), it will turn redder.
I don't think this distinction stems from the same source. Blue/green distinction is a clear step in linguistic development that happened in different stages for different civilisations, but they're more of a result of linguistic developments, local available colours, and manufacturing capability than a reference to plants.
This particular cabbage is coloured by a chemical that responds to the pH of the stuff it comes into contact with. The colour can range from quite bright red to quite clear blue, and even green or yellow.
It's perfectly possible for the red cabbages to be turned into blue dishes, and the pH of the soil will also have a large effect on the colour produced by the plant. You can see on various stock photos how the plant has a clear blue hue (before harvesting, at least): https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/rotkraut.html?pseudoid=562... Even ignoring the leaves, the outside of the parts that generally get cooked have a clear blue hue in many pictures I can see.
The reason "lila" wasn't used to describe the cabbage is that the German language lacked a word for it. It entered the German vocabulary somewhere in the 19th century (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lila#German). In a similar fashion, there was no separate word for orange in many European languages until somewhere around the 15th-16th century, when oranges (the fruit) were starting to get imported. You had yellow-red and other hue combinations, but it wasn't as separate as it is today.
I'm sure there were people who used "Rotblaukohl", but it makes sense that only one colour remained.
As for the carrot, orange carrots were actually not all the common for centuries. The original plants now known as carrots were imported to Europe from the middle east and cultivated in the Netherlands, but orange carrots weren't all that common in Europe before the 16th/17th century. The base plant of the orange carrot was actually white/yellow and got its orange outside hue quite some time later, after selective breeding. I wouldn't be surprised if the carrots that were first exported to modern German areas were still yellow in colour. Gelbrübe for orange carrots makes a lot of sense, historically.
I do like the "purple yellow root" name, especially since the first carrot cultivars to reach Europe (long before orange/yellow carrots) were actually purple. I don't think they received quite the popularity carrots received, at least not much further north than the Mediterranean.
>The reason "lila" wasn't used to describe the cabbage is that the German language lacked a word for it.
This is totally it, some people just decided to name it the way they saw it, and depending on the region were they lived.
Rotblaukohl was probably the middle ground, but there's in German a rule to join two colors: das blaurote Kleid (the blue-red dress), in this case it would mean the dress has two colors blue and red.
I might be very far from my area of expertise TBH.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces