On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 8:35 AM, Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
I read Japanese well enough to transliterate hiragana, and those screenshots clearly show a "chisai tsu" less than half as tall as the
"te"
preceding it and the "sa" following. Accordingly, those five characters should be read as "te s sa i ga."
Which doesn't mean the article should be moved! As someone else pointed out, our article on the big guy is at [[Godzilla]], not [[Gojira]].
I think there's a difference: Godzilla was intentionally changed. It's not the same as the original Japanese, but it's not a *mistake* either. It didn't arise because someone confused two similar-looking characters.
Was it? Our [[Godzilla]] article speculates (unsourced, probably needs citing) that it's a matter of using the wrong transliteration; ジ is "ji" in modern Hepburn romanization, while it's "dzi" in the first edition of his dictionary. Since the pronunciation "God-zi-la" doesn't work in Japanese phonology anyway -- correctly, it would be Go-dzi-la -- it does seem to be just an error.