CharlesRCaplan@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
> On Feb 11, 8:35 pm, Dan Clore <cl...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>> Christopher A. Lee wrote:
>>> On Mon, 11 Feb 2008 15:24:59 -0800, Dan Clore
>>> <cl...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>>>> T Guy wrote:
>>>>> ( tphile <tph...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> re The Gods of Japan):
>>>>>> and Godzilla stomped on all 8 million of them. Thou shalt
>>>>>> have no other gods under me or they go splat Don't mess
>>>>>> with the Big G
>>>>> Is that why he's called God zilla?
>>>> You do have to wonder how "Gojira" became "Godzilla" in
>>>> English.
>>> From Wikipedia: "The name "Godzilla" is a rough romanization of
>>> Gojira (???, Gojira?), a combination of two Japanese words:
>>> gorira (???, lit. "gorilla"?) and kujira (???, lit. "whale"?). At
>>> one planning stage, the concept of "Gojira" was described as "a
>>> cross between a gorilla and a whale," alluding to Godzilla's
>>> size, power and aquatic origin." [Me] Gorira is an obvious im****t
>>> from the English because Japan doesn't have gorillas.
>> Which still doesn't address how the God got in Godzilla.
>
> Older versions of the Hepburn Romanization used different English
> letters to represent different Japanese kana.
>
> For example the plant spelled Kudzu in English is actually pronounced
> Ku-Zu in Japanese and in modern Hepburn Romanization it would also
> have been spelled Kuzu not Kudzu, but Zu was spelled Dzu under an old
> version of the Romanization. So to did Ji have a different spelling
> under older versions of the Romanization. Originally it was spelled
> Dzi but pronounced Ji. Further the 'R' sound in Japanese is actually
> closer to the 'L' sound in English. Individual Japanese simply chose
> the letter they prefer for the Romanization of their names, and
> official spellings simply chose one or the other. I see 'R' used if
> it is the beginning of a word and a double "L" used if it is on the
> end. If "R" is found in the middle of the word it seems to be a toss
> up. So Gojira was probably spelled Godzila under this old version of
> the Romanization, but still pronounced Gojira. So what happened is
> that the person that translated the material for the Americanized
> version was using the obsolete Hepburn Romanization of the Japanese
> characters. So we have Godzilla and not Gogeerah. I don't think the
> mangling of his name has hurt his popularity any.
Thanks for the explanation! That's very interesting.
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction, _The Unspeakable and Others_:
http://tinyurl.com/3akhhr
Lord We˙rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Strange pleasures are known to him who flaunts the
immarcescible purple of poetry before the color-blind.
-- Clark Ashton Smith, "Epigrams and Apothegms"
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