Turdinae 3

The distribution of the Turdinae in East Asia can be seen at Tzung-Su Ding's Distribution of Turdinae in East Asia.

1. Turdus eunomus is separated from T. naumanni in Howard & Moore 2003. Japanese does not not yet have species names, only subspecies names, which are as follows:

2. The names of the thrushes have been regularised in Chinese. All end in the character 鸫 dōng.

3. Obunsha's Kanwa Chu Jiten claims that the use of the character for 'thrush' is Japanese in origin. Traditionally, in Chinese 鶇 was used in a compound word referring to the Wryneck (woodpecker).

Attempts to find earlier or alternative Chinese expressions for the thrushes in the Cihai are not very revealing. For 鸫 dōng, the Cihai simply states that it refers to the Turdinae. There are no references to or citations from ancient sources. 鸫 is a word without a history.

The Cihai does, however, give a cross-reference to 乌鸫 wū-dōng ('blackbird'), a bird commonly found in China. Under 乌鸫 wū-dōng we find the alternative expression 乌 wū-chūn. The character chūn doesn't appear anywhere else in the Cihai, making it impossible to clarify its meaning and usage. (The Kangxi Dictionary glosses it only as 'a kind of bird'.)

The Cihai also mentions that the 乌鸫 wū-dōng used to be known as the 百舌 bǎi-shé 'hundred tongues' because of its versatile song. Curiously, in Japanese the characters 百舌 are used to write the name of the shrikes.

4. The fact that the Japanese turned to 鶇, 鵼, and 鵺 to write the names of the thrushes is probably due to lack of suitable Chinese words corresponding to Japanese ツグミ tsugumi and ヌエ nue (see the writing of Japanese bird names in Chinese characters).

The ヌエ nue (White's thrush) in Japanese (鵼 or 鵺) was also a mythical monster with the head of a monkey, the body of a racoon-dog, the tail of a snake, the limbs of a tiger, and the voice of a White's thrush. Such a monster was said to have been shot down by the 12th century Japanese military leader (shogun in later terminology) known as Minamoto no Yorimasa.