On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 8:35 AM, Ken Arromdee <arromdee(a)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.
--
--jpgordon ∇∆∇∆