Woo, Death Note wank!

[telophase]

Going strong. It was sparked when someone posted to fanficrants complaining about the whole Light/Raito romanization issue. (For thsoe of you who are unaware of this, the scanlators started calling the character "Raito" and then it came out that the mangaka's official romanization was "Light." It has further been established that the mangaka has a serious tin ear for English, as "Near," "Mello," and "Quillsh Wammy" should hint.)

But I'm not posting for that, I'm posting for this, from puipui:

I'd just like to take a moment to point out that the official romanization given by Togashi Yoshihiro for a name in Hunter x Hunter that is pronounced "Pakunoda" is, as given in the official handbook for the series, "Phalcnothdk". Kurapika's official spelling is "Curarpikt", Shizuku's official spelling is "Chzzok", Ubogin's official spelling is "Wbererguin" and Kuroro Lucifer's official spelling is "Quwrof Wrlccywrlir".

I have learned several lessons from this:

1) Although it takes a whole hell of a lot of effort to get to one, there really is such a thing as an incorrect romanization.

2) Although the wishes of the original Japanese author should be respected when it comes to romanization, that does not necessarily make their opinion the only valid opinion.

3) Death Note fans have absolutely no idea how good they have it.

and, of course, 4) Togashi Yoshihiro is on crack.

Although, to be fair, I already knew that about #4, really.

It made me laugh and yes, I did scare the cat.

ETA: And in that selfsame thread, we learn that a 13-year-old American girl in the Death Note novel is named Backyard Bottomslash. Man I hope Viz translates it, sooooon.

Comments

[umadoshi.livejournal.com]

*dies on so many levels, all of them funny*

[telophase.livejournal.com]

XD I'm loving this particular wank, and am only sad that I really can't come with any new funny to post over there to use all my Death Note icons.... *cries*

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I am beyond words.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

We have got to put more crack into whatever we do. It makes the fanpoodles insane, in a good way for selling more books. :)


Plus, there's the advantage of gettign to screw with poeple's heads.

[seajules]

And thus we see that it's not so much intended romanization as intended Welshification. Or maybe Dune-ification.

I hope you'll forgive me if I only point and laugh at anybody who attempts to pick a fight with me over either assertion made above.

[chibi-nasu.livejournal.com]

I have long been convinced that Togashi knows some rules of the English language that nobody else in the world can understand. Another example would be him titling one of his manga as "Level E" because the "E" could stand for "Aliens."

[chisotahn]

Hehe, I remain vaguely annoyed at one of my Hunter x Hunter posters that has that 'Curarpikt' romanization for Kurapica on it. I just CANNOT figure out how they could possibly think those syllables in Japanese would equal that spelling!

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Someone suggested that the mangaka spelled it by banging his head against the keyboard. I think that sounds plausible.

[chisotahn]

It's possible, yes. Especially considering for a while, he was drawing the manga in these ridiculous scribbles. >>;;;

There's a REASON I like the anime a lot better...

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

My god, they aren't even made up of consonant clusters. They honestly look like someone banged blindly on the keyboard and just edited out any accidental punctuation.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Many years ago I had a friend who discovered that there was a Japanese font on the computer she used, and she typed in her Asian Religions paper title and converted it to the Japanese font, and then was surprised when her professor told her it was completely gibberish, because it didnt occur to her that no, there isn't a one-to-one correspondence between letters on the English keyboard and Japanese characters.

I think much the same thing is happening here.

[magicnoire.livejournal.com]

Wow, the things I miss out on by not having any familiarity with Hunter x Hunter. I must admit, those are some very impressive Romanizations there.

And.... Backyard Bottomslash? That's, um, special.

[matildarose.livejournal.com]

What I can't understand is.... why do people keep saying they think a name like 'Light' is too stupid to use and thus use Raito because IT SOUNDS MORE AWESOMEOMG? I can understand the whole 'got used to using Raito so I just keep doing that', but 'OMG LIGHT SOUNDS SO STUPID!!'? Did these people just get on the 'lol anime/manga train'? Or.. am I the only one who finds a lot of official character names in anime and manga that are so goofy that'd make Light sound as normal as 'Bob Smith'?

Hands down, the author probably named Light 'Light' because it sounded cool, not because he was trying to be OMG JAPANESE or OMG AUTHENTIC. C'mon. We know he smokes the crack. Let's just agree on that and continue.

yes i do like preaching to the choir why do you ask

[szzzt.livejournal.com]

Read this a couple times, then started laughing so hard I couldn't see. Now my tummy hurts. Good work!

[maiteoida.livejournal.com]

HAHA, BEST CASE OF CRAZY ROMANIZATION EVER.

And as far as the DN wank goes...I always prefered Raito to Light myself, despite how more "official" one is. In the end, it's pronounced "Raito" anyway, and assuming that he writes his name on documents with the kanji for "raito" rather than the katakana for "light", well...yeah. Not like it's really that important anyway. ^^;

[matildarose.livejournal.com]

I guess, maybe, after reading the many comments about the whole Raito/Light deal, it's more the stupid/sane reasonings people come up with. I myself don't care either way; I lost track of the series after the big climax of events that happened in the middle of the timeline. XD

There's sane reasons like 'eh, I got used to Raito' or 'Raito kinda sounds better to me'. Then there's stupid ones like 'RAITO SOUNDS MORE JAPANESE' or 'I DON'T CARE WHAT THE AUTHOR SAYS!!!' and 'THE AUTHOR'S FULL OF BS!', all of which I saw in those threads. @_@

I'd just go with 'the author's full of crack, for better or worse' and just keep it at that. :D

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

But the kanji is "tsuki" (moon or month), and "light" is an unusual reading for it with (as I recall) the katakana for "light" as pronounced in Japanese, ie, "ra-i-to." So it makes no sense to romanize Light as Raito unless you're also romanizing L as e-ru.

oh god now I'm getting sucked into it. this is a series by a mangaka who believes that Eraldo Coil is a plausible name for a human being American man.

[maiteoida.livejournal.com]

Somehow I thought "raito" was an alternate (rare, I assumed) pronounciation of tsuki, rather than "light" being an alternate reading. Guh. My mistake (I swear I read it somewhere...probably read wrong). Still, the dork in me still kinda liked "raito" because it could be both "light" and "right", which I thought was cool and appropriate. But whatever. XD Knowing that Obata was just having fun with names is cool too.

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

Well, it's both, because you can't say "light" in Japanese letters. So it has to be written in hiragana/katakana as raito. But it's not a rare Japanese pronunciation. It's a rare reading of the word in English.

Like, 硝子 is often used for glass, pronounced garasu. But those characters do not actually read garasu. It's simply using kanji for an English word, and then coming up against the limitations of the Japanese language/alphabet in writing and pronouncing that English word.

[thomasyan.livejournal.com]

I need to ask Yoshihiro to secretly give me some names: I'd use them for passwords!

[matildarose.livejournal.com]

I think you can achieve the same effect by A. banging your head randomly against a keyboard, or B. sitting on it. :O

[thomasyan.livejournal.com]

But I also need the intended pronunciation as a mnemonic! Oh wait, that's more distraction than help, isn't it? Never mind :)

[kelso.livejournal.com]

So, riddle me this-- Is Mello a boy or a girl? I can't figure that out.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Mello is a boy with a penchant for dressing in clothes from the International Male catalog.

He's girly, but if you study the way Obata draws the flat chest, the strong shoulders, and the way he defines the arm muscles, it's more obvious.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I am about to demonstrate appalling Hunter X Hunter fangeekery. I apologize in advance.

There is actually a reason for those deranged Romanizations: Togashi developed a different alphabet to use in his world. It looks like a cross between a written-out flag code and Ancient Mayan, and if you have merchandise there's probably a sentence of the stuff on it somewhere. This alphabet does a thing where, like Japanese, it has a vowel sound with each syllable, but in some circumstances each letter can represent a sound without an end vowel-- in which case the first sound and second sound may not have anything to do with one another. It works this way because the alphabet is supposed to be a kind of universal coding system able to represent any sound from any language, so if you were in that world you'd read all signs everywhere using your language's reading of each letter and then if necessary look the resulting word up in a your language/signwriter's language dictionary.

The official romanizations of the names from Hunter X Hunter include, for each letter, the reading of the letter in Japanese and the reading of the letter in the character's native language, shoved in one after the other at random. So in 'Curarpikt' Cu is Cu-with-a-hard-C in both languages (though I don't know why it's a c and not a k), ra is ra, ru is p and the u was elided, i is i, and ka is t, with the a elided. Since we aren't given a pronunciation guide to any of the characters' native languages (although a couple of them happen to be things like English and French), it is entirely possible that Kurapika's tribe would read Curapit as Kurapika.

... yeah, stopping fangeekery now. I only know all this because on the back of one of the posters I got was a gigantic guide to reading the HXH alphabet in about six different languages.

Also? Yoshihiro Togashi is on CRACK to have done all this without bothering to explain it to the audience.

[vheeri-baby.livejournal.com]

Quwrof Wrlccywrlir

Everytime I see that or the others I want to punch whoever uses it in the throat. I know a fanfic writer who has a popular story that may actually be good, but theres no way in hell I'd read it simply because the authoress refuses to use anything else.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Off-topic, but when I saw a comment on a years-old post, I assumed it was spam, but when I got here, you appear to be a real person! Hello! :D

[vheeri-baby.livejournal.com]

Lol, yea, I know it's old, but I have to agree. Some romanizations are just... no. Even names like Franklin, an automatically Western name, and Kikyo, an already Japanese name, are butchered. How?! Togashi needs to get an American friend to smack him upside the head.