On Mon, 21 Jul 2008, Josh Gordon wrote:
Was it? Our [[Godzilla]] article speculates (unsourced,
probably needs
citing) that it's a matter of using the wrong transliteration; 㸠is "ji"
in
modern Hepburn romanization, while it's "dzi" in the first edition of his
dictionary.
Um, the article says nothing about a dictionary in that context.
Personally I'm skeptical that it's an error because at the time, Japanese
material was routinely changed a lot when brought over, the names being
the least part of it.
But even then, there's another difference: the name is already in such wide
use that Wikipedia isn't going to affect it much. Google shows that
"Godzilla" has 11 times the hits of "Gojira". But Tetsusaiga gives me
112000
hits and Tessaiga gives me 83300; under these circumstances, Wikipedia is
likely to *influence* adoption of the incorrect name. (Especially since
there are fewer independent reference works dealing with Tessiaga than
with Godzilla, so Wikipedia's influence is a much bigger piece of the pie.)