Kiwifruit industry in New Zealand and Growers, who were calling the berries "melonettes", because the local name for the fruit, "Chinese gooseberry", had political connotations due to the Cold War, and to further distinguish it from real gooseberries, which are prone to a fungus called anthracnose. An American importer, Norman Sondag of San Francisco, complained that "melonettes" was as bad as "Chinese gooseberry" because melons and berries were both subject to high import tariffs, and instead asked for a short Maori name that quickly connoted New Zealand. In June 1959, during a meeting of Turners and Growers management in Auckland, Jack Turner suggested the name
Historical Chinese phonology with EMC stops are reflected with stops while others are reflected with "softened" consonants, typically voiced fricatives or approximants. Such "softened stops" occur in both "yin" and "yang" classes, suggesting that proto-Min had both unvoiced and voiced "softened stops". Presumably "softened stops" were actually fricatives of some sort, but it is unclear exactly what they were. Scholars generally assume that these additional proto-Min sounds reflect distinctions in Old Chinese that vanished in Early Middle Chinese but remained in proto-Min. Until recently, no reconstructions of Old Chinese specifically accounted for the proto-Min distinctions, but the recent reconstruction of William Baxter and