Why the u matters in Japanese

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takenoko
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Why the u matters in Japanese

Post by takenoko »

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I figured I'd write this piece just as an explanation for why we spell things the way we do at TV-Nihon.

To explain the above picture, I wanted to show how important the letter u is in differentiating between Kamen Rider #1 and Kamen Rider Strawberry. It makes a difference, so why do people drop the u's? Do they have a good reason for doing so? Let's discuss this.

First, the main problem with the appearance and lack of u's is a lack of a good modern way of writing Japanese in English. Technically, anything goes. So the words "Shou", "Sho" or "Show" can all refer to the same name in Japanese depending on the preference of the person. The old ways can be frustrating because it leads to J sounds being spelled with Z like ZyuRanger.

In general, it seems like most people don't have a preference or it falls upon the whim of the website creator. I don't know if this is the case, but it seems like most of Yoshiki Risa's stuff spells her name as Risa. But for a while, her CDs spelled her name as Lisa. Anyway, the point here is that it's often hard to tell what official spellings for names are. There are often a lot of contradictory examples.

So what's the issue here with u's? Why are there so many in our subs? Well, they're there to represent long vowels. Like Kota is a good example. If you said co-ta in English as spelled, it'd come out as two harsh, terse syllables. If you listen to how his name is said in the show, the long o in his name puts a pause between the ko and ta and softens the sounds in general.

If you can read the Japanese alphabet, you can see that the Japanese do add u's or dashes to represent these sounds. So it's a little weird when they're not represented in the English version.

In Japanese, Youko and Yoko are different names. So isn't it strange if Yoko represents both Yoko and Youko? They're technically not even homonyms in this case because of the pronunciation difference. From a linguistic standpoint, a word is less useful the less representative it is of its true meaning. Or if it has two separate meanings.

So why do people drop the u's? Maybe they saw the way we saw Kyouryuuger and decided there were too many u's. But for a short name like Tarou, I don't really see what benefit you get from dropping the last u. And there are a lot of names based on Tarou, so stuff like Shoutarou, Keitarou, Ryoutarou, Koutarou, Gentarou all lose their u's at the end. And I don't really see what people get out of spelling things that way, except maybe they once saw those names spelled that way at some point on something semi-official?

There are good reasons to drop the u's though. Like with Guridon, dropping the u makes it look more like a name. Unfortunately, it also makes it look like Grid-on, which is silly. Or with Futo. If it's an established name, it's convenient to use the official spelling because some will or intent was put behind the spelling. We just didn't like Kyouryuger because it arbitrarily dropped the last u but not the first u. Also KyouryuZin is stupid.

But like I stated at the beginning, those official spellings are pretty arbitrary. To the surprise of no one, Japanese don't super care about spelling things right in English. It's just there to be cool and is often based on the lazy romanizing standards of the past. To use Toqger as an example, I've seen material saying the emperor's name is Z, Zet, and Zett. You can't treat official material like it's sacrosanct.

Not to say things are always doom and gloom for the u's. In the anime Oreimo, the character's name Kousuke isn't reduced to Kosuke in the show or the subs. He even has his name spelled out in English on his door. So at least some people in Japan care about making it more accurate.

Wikipedia's way of handling this is pretty good actually. They represent all the long vowel's with a long on the top like this: Saitō Hajime. The only problem is, I'm a simple guy, and if I saw that in my subs, I'd think it'd look really ugly. Hence, why we'd spell it as Saitou Hajime.

If you're ever not sure about how to spell something the TV-Nihon way, just look at the top of the forum and you'll see a link to the series' wiki page. Then just look under characters: http://wiki.tvnihon.com/wiki/Kamen_Ride ... Characters
The wiki page is helpful since I also usually list the reasoning for why a name is spelled the way it is, and will include some trivia behind it if I'm aware of it.

In the end, it doesn't really matter how you spell it, most people will know what you mean and all points back to the same source. But personally, I think the way we spell things is a little more accurate.
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Re: Why the u matters in Japanese

Post by xiiliea »

Haha...

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Re: Why the u matters in Japanese

Post by takenoko »

Noooo!
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Re: Why the u matters in Japanese

Post by jonty »

Here's something I've wondered: you say that the shorter vowel sound (e.g. "o" without a U) is not homonymic with the longer one (e.g. "ou" with a U). That makes sense.

In Japanese, the longer sound is represented with just an added character rather than a completely different kana, right? So does Japanese wordplay utilize this similar-but-different situation? Like, is "Ichigou" considered a rhyme to "Ichigo"? I want to say I remember seeing something that did use it (maybe Yakitate!! Japan?), but I'm not sure. I haven't seen any Gaim, but it looks like there's an "Ichigou" form or something? Is that a play on the Ichigo arms?
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Re: Why the u matters in Japanese

Post by takenoko »

>Here's something I've wondered: you say that the shorter vowel sound (e.g. "o" without a U) is not homonymic with the longer one (e.g. "ou" with a U). That makes sense.

Right, Koutarou and Kotarou are technically different names, but both can be written as Kotaro technically.

>In Japanese, the longer sound is represented with just an added character rather than a completely different kana, right?

Yeah. It's literally the hiragana for "u". For people who had trouble parsing the question, Jonty's asking if there's a unique character for such sounds, in the same way an interrobang is used to represent "!?". But they just use a "u" or a dash to represent long vowels like this.

>So does Japanese wordplay utilize this similar-but-different situation?

Comedy is pretty loose in Japan, as some of their terrible puns show. For comedy purposes they would be considered homonyms or close enough for pun purposes

>Like, is "Ichigou" considered a rhyme to "Ichigo"?

In Japanese, no, they'd be two different words. Maybe someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the "u" is counted in the characters counted in the 5-7-5 format for haiku.

>I haven't seen any Gaim, but it looks like there's an "Ichigou" form or something? Is that a play on the Ichigo arms?

In the movie there's Ichigou arms which is based on Kamen Rider Ichigou. Not to be confused with Ichigo (strawberry) arms.

By the way, the essay/rant above is just a draft. If someone has any suggestions or questions, definitely let me know. I plan to polish it a bit more before publishing it on the front page. I plan to add more counter examples where the official spellings of actors drop the u. Since it is important to acknowledge the exceptions to the rule. If an actor says "I spell my name this way" that's what you should go with, since that's more or less as official as it can be.
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Re: Why the u matters in Japanese

Post by Lunagel »

>Like, is "Ichigou" considered a rhyme to "Ichigo"?

In Japanese, no, they'd be two different words. Maybe someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the "u" is counted in the characters counted in the 5-7-5 format for haiku.

U is counted, so Ichigou is 4 syllables while Ichigo is 3. You can fudge it a bit but for the most part it's pretty strict.

Also, Japan doesn't really have "rhymes" per se, the syllabary system is too easy to rhyme, hence why haiku is the traditional poetry and rhyming isn't necessary. Honestly Japanese children have a hard time understanding the concept of rhyming because most words sound similar anyway so they don't understand why it's such a big deal in English. Japanese lends itself much better to puns.
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Re: Why the u matters in Japanese

Post by jonty »

Okay, so then is an ichigou/ichigo pun something that happens often enough?

Like when the Ichigou arms in Gaim appeared, did people make Ichigo jokes? Or was it itself an Ichigo joke?
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Re: Why the u matters in Japanese

Post by takenoko »

Oh no, I've never seen ichigo/ichigou used as a pun. Not that it hasn't happened, I just haven't seen it myself.
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Re: Why the u matters in Japanese

Post by Kogashi »

More often you'll get the Ichigo (person's name) to Ichigo (strawberry) pun. Taking Bleach an example, Ichigo getting slapped with the nickname 'Berry-kun' by some characters.
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Re: Why the u matters in Japanese

Post by jonty »

I mean, it just seems interesting to me that the only difference between the way the two are spelled (using kana) is literally only one extra character and yet it's not (as far as we can see) utilized for wordplay.

I mean the Ichigou Arms thing is practically asking for it, no?
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Re: Why the u matters in Japanese

Post by takenoko »

Yeah I dunno, considering every bad pun out there exists in toku, you'd think it was a thing. I think the closest it ever got was TOQ 3 saying she wanted to meet V3 since they were fellow Sangou during the Gaim VS Toqger special. And that wasn't really so much a pun so much as it was wordplay.
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Re: Why the u matters in Japanese

Post by Lunagel »

I think maybe because it's too obvious?
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Re: Why the u matters in Japanese

Post by jonty »

When has something being too obvious stopped them before? XD

When I was laying in bed last night, I remembered that DekaBlue's name is Houji, but they nicknamed him Hoji to go with the tea theme, right? Isn't that exactly the kind of wordplay we're talking about?
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Re: Why the u matters in Japanese

Post by takenoko »

Sure, but Hojicha is technically Houjicha XD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hojicha You can see the line over the o's in the article.

Huh, Houjicha is made from Bancha. Guess that explains that relationship.
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Re: Why the u matters in Japanese

Post by jonty »

Wait, so I don't get it. Houji's nickname was Houji?

"Okay, so we need some fun naming trend this year. What do you guys think?

How 'bout a tea theme?

Banban -> Ban
Koume -> Umeko
Senichi -> Sen

Umm...

Marika -> Jasmine

Sure, why the hell not?

Houji -> Houji

Eh, I'm tired. That's good enough"
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