Talk:Kai Lung

Chinese characters

Are the Chinese characters really known to have been by Ernest Bramah himself, as opposed to speculations by others? In any case, Bramah would almost certainly not have used Unicode character U99F9, which is a PRC "simplified" character which would not have been part of any official Chinese orthography until well after his death. The image http://home.freeuk.com/ctol2001/img/kanji.jpg actually shows Unicode character U9F8D. I'm a little dubious about the whole thing, but as a minimum step I'm replacing U99F9 with U9F8D. AnonMoos (talk) 20:13, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks—I did actually mean to put in the traditional character for "dragon" rather than the simplified one. I don't know whether these characters were used (or even thought of) by Bramah himself (though it's unlikely that he did, since it's known that he never went to China, and probably did not know any Chinese). However, the fact that they appear on the cover of one of the editions is itself significant. Perhaps we shouldn't claim that 開龍 is the "real" way to write Kai Lung's name, but there should at least be a note that it is one possible way to write his name (which has in some sense been "authorized"). --Śiva (talk) 15:35, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Derivation of name

It occurs to me that Bramah may have named his character after the famous 1st-2nd century official and inventor Cai Lun (also transliterated as Tsai Lung, etc.). I wonder if there are any references that would corroborate (or refute) this. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 2.122.56.237 (talk) 12:17, 24 December 2020 (UTC)

It seems quite unlikely, since the spelling with "C" is Pinyin, and Pinyin was invented in the 1950s, after Ernest Bramah had died, and long after the first Kai Lung publication... AnonMoos (talk) 12:34, 24 December 2020 (UTC)