Engelbert Kaempfer, Genemon Imamura and the origin of the name Ginkgo

AbstractThe unusual spelling of the genus Ginkgo has long attracted scholarly interest. It is well known that Linnaeus took the name from the Amoenitatum exoticarum of Kaempfer, and that Kaempfer relied on the 17th century Japanese illustrated encyclopedia Kinmo Zui for some of the names he took for Japanese plants. But why Kaempfer transliterated the name as “Ginkgo”, a pronunciation that does not exist in contemporary Japanese, has been debated. The recognition that Kaempfer’s young assistant was Genemon Imamura, a native of Nagasaki, provides a new perspective. Analysis of the plant names in the Amoenitatum exoticarum and comparison with the names in the Kinmo Zui shows that Kaempfer sought to faithfully transcribe the pronunciations of Genemon’s late medieval Nagasaki dialect into his transliterations. Ginkgo is one of several examples for which transliteration of the Nagasaki dialect accounts for Kaempfer’s unusual spelling of a word or name.