Horn Bow or Hornbow?

Thomas Duvernay · Post by **Thomas Duvernay** » Thu Apr 14, 2005 2:30 am

I'm sure most any dictionary, if not all, would not have the word hornbow listed. It just kind of crossed my mind that there is the word longbow in dictionaries. I have written both horn bow and hornbow in the past. Should we, as a world-wide group of Asian archery scholars, make hornbow an accepted term in our field, and hope that someday linguists will accept it? Just curious.

T

Samuraiwarrior · Post by **Samuraiwarrior** » Thu Apr 14, 2005 2:46 am

I was thinking of this the other day Thomas. I also use both, all of the time in my writing, and I bet even in a paper I wrote I changed it around! I also don't think it matters at all. We are still getting the same 'word(s)' across and we definitely understand what it means. But if it was possible, I would join to try and make hornbow a real, and accepted, word in the world.

Thomas Duvernay · Post by **Thomas Duvernay** » Thu Apr 14, 2005 5:05 am

I have mostly used them separated: horn bow. However, there is precendent in other languages for them being together. For example, the Chinese characters--from what the Koreans get their name for it--are (Korean pronunciation) "gahkgoong" (角弓). It's supposed to be all one word, but I always romanize it as two ("gahk goong").

T

Stephen Selby · Post by **Stephen Selby** » Fri Apr 15, 2005 2:04 am

We have the same discussion here about whether you should write 'trade mark' or 'trademark'. Now we have gone over to 'trademark'.

I am starting to use 'hornbow' myself. From a tecchie point of view, though, a search on 'hornbow' would find you less results than a search on 'hornbow'. Google found 818 'hornbows' and 1,270,000 'horn bows'

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