Talk:Savile Row

RFD discussion: October 2022–January 2023

See Category talk:en:Named roads#RFD discussion: October 2022–January 2023.

Seiburo?

Can a Japanese editor confirm this? @Eirikr, Fish bowl

Mark Tungate (2008) Branded Male: Marketing to Men, Kogan Page Publishers, →ISBN, page 51: “The heartland of traditional tailoring is undoubtedly London's Savile Row. So vital is this single street to the history of men's suiting that the Japanese word for suit is ‘seiburo’ – a corruption of the words 'Savile Row'.”

– Jberkel 12:40, 23 January 2023 (UTC)

• @Jberkel: The author misspells the Japanese term -- it should be sebiro, with a short "e". Our entry is at Japanese 背広 (sebiro, spelled "back" + "wide", parsing out to "wide-backed"), but I notice now that it's missing some detail.

Numerous monolingual Japanese sources include mention of the Savile Row derivation theory; by way of example, view the relevant page here in Kotobank (a monolingual Japanese resource aggregator website), and search the page for "savile".

That said, any direct connection to Savile Row is somewhat unclear, as described in the Japanese references I've looked in. The Nihon Kokugo Daijiten (NKD) is roughly analogous to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) only for Japanese, and according to the entry here, the term first appears in Japanese in 1870. In the entry notes at the bottom of that entry, starting with (2)語源については, they lay out five initial theories:

1. literally "wide-backed" from the way there are no visible seams across the back of a suit jacket
2. meaning "wide over the back" as a rough translation of English sack coat
3. as a borrowing and shift of English civil clothes
4. as a borrowing and shift of English Savile Row
5. as a borrowing and shift of English Cheviot, in reference to the wool used to make suits

The NKD entry states that the civil clothes derivation is considered most likely. This theory is mentioned as an equally-likely possibility alongside the Savile Row derivation in other monolingual Japanese dictionaries that I've looked into.

The NKD notes then continue to mention a work from 1860, the [https:／dcollections.lib.keio.ac.jp/en/fukuzawa/a01/1 増訂華英通語] (Zōtei Ka-Ei Tsūgo, “Revised Chinese-English Glossary”) published by a Japanese philologist after traveling to San Francisco and reworking an English-Chinese dictionary for a Japanese audience. Apparently the original Chinese included the character 背 (“back, one's backside”) in the translations of various English clothing terms, such as 背心 (bèixīn, literally “back + heart”) for vest or 新背心 (literally “new + back + heart”) for new waistcoat, appearing on page 51 of the PDF of the Japanese revised work. That glossary lacks any entry for coat, however, and I see that there are two entries for different kinds of jacket further down that same page, and neither use the character 背. The term double jacket is glossed in Chinese characters as 來衲／来衲 (lái nà), which does not appear to be a Chinese word and is presumably a transcription of English liner. By contrast, 背心 (bèixīn) appears to be a native Chinese term and not a transcription at all, from a basic sense of "(what one puts over one's) back (and) heart (i.e. chest)". This could suggest then that the use of 背 in 背広 is influenced by the Chinese term by analogy.

Personally, I suspect that Savile Row may well be the actual derivation, with the Chinese-character spelling an example of phonetic and semantic ateji. The term civil as pronounced by a Japanese speaker would wind up as シビル (shibiru), not せびろ (sebiro), and there is no clear mechanism or other apparent reason why shibiru would shift to sebiro. Meanwhile, Savile Row would become sabiru rō or sebiru rō if borrowed from careful English enunciation, with the initial vowel's value depending on how closely the speaker pronounces the "a" in "Savile". If from more casual and faster speech, where the final /l/ in "Savile" and the initial /r/ in "Row" are pronounced as less distinct individual sounds, "Savile Row" could indeed quite easily become sebiro in Japanese phonology.

HTH! ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 19:41, 23 January 2023 (UTC)