serene

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. One show that we covered recently was the anime Sailor Moon. 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. 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.

You see, Usagi/Serena is also the superhero Sailor Moon, and Serenity is queen of the moon. 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. 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.

Among 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. Etymonline 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.”

Anyway, 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. If you’re processing those sounds the way a Japanese speaker would, there’s an implied wordplay that just doesn’t work as well in English — or maybe does make sense so long as you don’t look up the etymologies, in which case… I’m sorry?