This short essay will attempt to explain why there are some major problems with the "amazoness" in the term "Amazoness Quartet."

The Japanese script, when transliterated into English letters, would be "amazonesu." It has come to my attention that this string of katakana characters, in Japanese, is used in books on mythology to refer to the Greek term "amazones" which means "amazons." The Greek term is plural, but since the Japanese language doesn't indicate true plurality, the string of characters "amazonesu" is used as a collective name. When the Japanese write Greek terms into their language, they don't only use the often nonsensical English pronunciations of those terms. For example, a Japanese person wouldn't simply write the name Cyrene as "Sairini" because in English it sounds like "sigh-ree-nee." Instead, the Japanese writer would use the more-accepted spelling "Kyurene" since the Greek spelling of the name Cyrene is "Kyrene."

There are people who claim that Takeuchi wished to use the terms "amazon" to refer to a group of males and "amazoness" to refer to a group of females. They justify their assumption by asserting that Takeuchi didn't fully understand the word "amazon." Though this sounds like a neat and tidy way to explain the "amazonesu" in Japanese, there are several major flaws in this theory. For one thing, and obviously, the word "amazon" isn't only used in English. It's a word that's used a lot in classical mythology to refer to that (apparently) mythical race of warrior women. Moreover, the idea that Takeuchi has never heard of the term "amazon" is simply ludicrous. If she wished to know what "amazon" meant, she should have looked in a dictionary or book about classical mythology. Any decent Japanese-language classical mythology resource will mention the terms "amazon" and "amazones" in their Japanese forms: "amazon" and "amazonesu." Takeuchi has already been using names from classical mythology, so how could she not understand the meaning of the well-used mythological term "amazon"?

Such a term "amazoness" is redundant. In Japanese, English, and Greek, when the term "amazon" is used to refer to people, these people are invariably female. Never is it used to refer to male people. The English suffix "-ess" already indicates females and putting it at the end of "amazon" doesn't make much sense in this case. It would be like taking the English word "maiden" and making it into "maideness." On the other hand, in Japanese, when the term "amazon" isn't referring to people, it refers to the river and rainforest in South America.

It shouldn't be forgotten that Takeuchi's target fans speak and read Japanese. She has to write these terms in ways that are recognizable to her audience. That means that she has to look elsewhere to be sure that she's spelling these words correctly in Japanese. The spellings of terms aren't at all random. Though she has come across variations in spellings, she had to use the one that's most commonly used. In Japanese, "amazonesu" is used specifically to refer to the Greek word. Even if Takeuchi wanted to it to be "amazoness," how would her Japanese-speaking audience know that? If they looked up "amazonesu," they're going to find that it's a term from mythology. Since the katakana string "amazonesu" is already used up, she's going to have to in some way find a way to alter it. This would be done to eliminate any sort of ambiguity. The most logical way to do that is by writing her term as "amazonessu" instead of "amazonesu." In other words, if she meant "amazoness," she should have written what she meant.

Submitted by: Ian Andreas Miller
Posted on: 11 / 18 / 2000