Donmai

alias baozi -> steamed bun

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BUR #34637 has been approved by @evazion.

create alias baozi -> steamed_bun

Renames baozi to "steamed bun".

Cons:

  • Not English or Japanese
  • More commonly just called "bao" or "bao bun"
  • Primarily refers to meat/veggie-filled buns (though a sweet, bean-filled variant exists)
  • Can sound plural
  • May require weeb knowledge (though aliases exist)
  • No consistency with longevity peach bun, manjuu kowai, etc.

Pros of baozi:

  • Somewhat common English name
  • Same language of origin as the food

The Japanese aliases "nikuman" and "manjuu" are often used interchangeably, but technically "nikuman" refers to meat/veggie and the other is the sweet bean-filled stuff. "manjuu" is quite a popular name for round, fluffy filled buns, but English speakers don't really use nikuman.

Google Images search for 'steamed buns' shows only Chinese bao buns, so there are few foods that it could be mistaken with.

The following are already aliased to baozi and would be aliased to steamed bun: manjuu, meat_bun, meatbun, nikuman, pork_bun, porkbun, steamed_bun

Verbatim Google search result counts:

  • "manju": 28,100,000 results
  • "bao buns": 2,610,000 results
  • "steamed buns": 1,840,000 results
  • "manjuu": 1,790,000 results
  • "steamed bun": 1,330,000 results
  • "bao bun": 1,250,000 results
  • "baozi": 1,680,000 results
  • "pork buns": 1,180,000 results
  • "pork bun": 908,000 results
  • "porkbun": 410,000 results
  • "meat bun": 368,000 results
  • "nikuman": 239,000 results
  • "bean bun": 164,000 results
  • "meat bun": 164,000 results
  • "porkbuns": 124,000 results
  • "bean buns": 93,500 results

Overall, steamed bun and manjuu (subject to romanization) bring up quite a bit more; putting bao bun as plural might bring up more due to many recipes.

LQ said:

BUR #34638 has been rejected.

create alias baozi -> manjuu

Back in topic #12262 (9 years ago) the opposite alias was put in place to deal with the very issue you mentioned:

The Japanese aliases "nikuman" and "manjuu" are often used interchangeably, but technically "nikuman" refers to meat/veggie and the other is the sweet bean-filled stuff. "manjuu" is quite a popular name for round, fluffy filled buns, but English speakers don't really use nikuman.

I have no strong opinion on the other proposals.

"manju": 28,100,000 results

This is inflated somewhat by the fact that "Manju" is an Indian personal name, as well as the brand name of a kind of sake, some sort of nutritional supplement, the developers of Azur Lane, etc. Not sure it's to the tune of 26 million false positives though.

I'll go with steamed bun, since there are many different regional varieties of this food with different names, and although many of them are inspired by the Chinese baozi, they're not all literally baozi. It makes sense to use a generic term instead of a Chinese word when the food may not be specifically Chinese.

The only problem I see is that this is supposed to be a filled steamed bun, not just any steamed bun with no fillings (i.e. a mantou), but there's usually no visual difference between the two.

Steamed bun also appears to have become a more popular English term for it over the last decade:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=steamed+bun%2C+baozi&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3

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