Re: [Epic] More painting of small details

From: Mark A Shieh <SHODAN+_at_...>
Date: Wed, 13 Aug 1997 12:54:56 -0400 (EDT)

Oki Purwanto <oki_at_...> writes:
> At 08:24 AM 8/13/97 -0400, you wrote:
> >Sauron1 writes; Mark, can you get the English-Japanese translation of
> >"SAURON1" to work. I have a new Bainlord Titan under construction and it
> >needs a name. I tried the suggested service but it din not give me a name.
>
> > sauron1
>
> Hmmm, my Mandarin was never my strong point. But the first thing that came
> to my mind was "Chao Ren", for Uber(super)-man. Pretty cool isn't it ? But
> this is from a guy who screw up his primary school Mandarin :(

        Hey, I *forgot* all of my primary school Mandarin. :( I used
to speak it until I was 3 and learned English, and then it's been
forgotten over the years.

        Well, the problem with Japanese is that when they incorporate
new words into their language, they tend to just borrow phonetically
from other languages. Chris used his name as a good example of this.
I don't know of any meaning of Sauron except as a proper name from
Tolkien, so I doubt it has a translation into kanji, most of which are
borrowed from Chinese with generally little change in meaning. As a
result, a Japanese writing it would probably just use the borrowed
language alphabet, katakana. Katakana is one of the harder things for
me to get right, but I'd attempt a phonetic translation as Sa-a-ro-n.
In katakana, it looks roughly like

 | | |----\ -- /
-+--+- ----- | | /
 | | | | /
   / |----- ---

(4 characters. You can also write it top to bottom, in which case the
second line becomes a vertical stroke instead of a horizontal.)
        
(I think that's right, anyway.) which isn't the pretty thing you're
looking for, probably. Hiragana looks more like cursive and katakana
looks more blocky, and they're all simple characters. If you're
actually going to use the katakana, I'd find an introductory Japanese
book and go to the katakana page and copy it down, as stroke direction
and order is important. Or just get a friend who knows it to write it
for you.

If you're looking for something to put on a banelord, I'd look for a
concept of a description that you could apply to a Banelord rather
than a proper name. I got a few things by looking up demon. The
first character in telephone usually makes something electric (If you
look up Electric, the first character is a prefix for most of the
things there). "denwa = electric + talk = telephone", and a few
others from Chinese (electric + mind or thought = computer, I think),
but I'm not sure if I have them right or if they exist in Japanese.
Electric demon seems approrpiate, even if it is more mechanical than
electric. You'd have to ask someone with more than 1 year of Japanese
to make sure you get it right. There's nothing worse than putting
Latin on your Space Marine banner and then realizing that you got it
wrong. (No, I don't even own any Marines.)

Also, putting down Chinese often works. Many of the kanji are the
same between the two languages, especially nouns. Besides, if you're
just going for a look, then it probably doesn't matter much.

Mark
Received on Wed Aug 13 1997 - 16:54:56 UTC