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Somen (noodles) sômen

The somen is a Japanese noodle that can be served hot or cold or in principle, but rather it is considered a summer dish. The noodle is made of wheat flour and the dough is very thin, especially white.

The soba is buckwheat noodles though. The zarusoba is particularly popular in summer. The word means zaru the trash, which suggests that the dish was previously served on this vessel. Now, it is presented on a sort of hurdle of cane or bamboo (sometimes plastic ...), often accompanied by dried seaweed nori . We can still meet the zarusoba served on zaru .
The soba, if served hot, is consumed throughout the year, unlike the somen whose image is linked to summer. Some popular restaurants called Sobaya , which are generally not specialized in these noodles. The designation means that the food is very popular with the Japanese. In my opinion, we eat more often at home somen, soba that we consume in restaurants.
The kanji used to write the word somen are misleading. It is composed of two Chinese characters 素 (single) and 麺 (noodle). But the first kanji is a phonetic borrowing, which does not retain its own meaning. Originally, this word should be written as 索 麺. The character that replaces 素 means "rope". The meaning of this word is not the simple noodles, but the hand-pulled noodles (as if the ropes were manufactured). Maybe it has selected the kanji meaning "simple" for a touch of freshness.
Reading the word should be 索 麺 sakumen , altered saümen (さ うめん) by the falling of the vowel u after k, and the transformation of the consonant vowel k passing by PA g in : sakumen, sakmen *, * sagmen, saümen . And saümen exchange somen (そう めん). We had to choose another kanji at this point. The caret means that the vowel has a long double. pronounced na-o-me-n . The other noodle
favorite Japanese ramen (ラーメン) is a Chinese dish Japanized. Previously, the word shinasoba (しなそ ば) soba of China, was used for the ramen , but we hear less and less frequently as some people think the word Shina (China) is not politically correct to Japan after the Second World War. In my opinion, if this word Shina can be felt as a word racist against the Chinese in Japan, it's pretty ridiculous to ban this element of compound words. (In Japanese, ch is pronounced as tch the Czech word. c. The French more like the Japanese sh Hepburn in the transcript that conventionally adopted for writing Japanese in Roman letters. )
There are people who say the shinasoba is not the same as ramen , claiming that the soup is done differently. I can give judgments on that.