Noodle wars

June 14, 2018 @ 6:12 am · Filed by under Lost in translation

« previous post | next post »

A fresh take on linguistic globalization:

https://youtu.be/8fvv_XrFUrk

June 14, 2018 @ 6:12 am · Filed by under Lost in translation


6 Comments

  1. Chas Belov said,

    June 16, 2018 @ 3:33 pm

    ROFLMAO, thank you!

  2. Michele Sharik said,

    June 16, 2018 @ 9:07 pm

    LOL!

    I am at about a 2nd-level of speaking Japanese and can read (slowly) both hiragana & katakana, but not Kanji. (I have been to Japan 8 times for short trips and can take a taxi, order food, buy train tickets, and do simple shopping. I studied at the Soko Gakuin school in San Francisco.)

    I have a question: Why is "Nissin" pronounced "Nishin"? I suppose a better question is why is "Nishin" romanized as "Nissin"?

  3. Brian Datsun said,

    June 16, 2018 @ 10:03 pm

    Michele: Nissin in hiragana is にっしん – the sokuon (small 'tsu') explains why the 's' is doubled. As for the missing 'h', I guess Nissin prefers the Nihon-shiki system of romanisation, in which し is romanised as 'si' rather than 'shi'.

  4. Michele Sharik said,

    June 17, 2018 @ 12:05 pm

    Brian Datsun wrote:
    > Nissin in hiragana is にっしん – the sokuon (small 'tsu') explains why the 's' is doubled.

    Yes, I got that. I do read kana, albeit slowly.

    > As for the missing 'h', I guess Nissin prefers the Nihon-shiki system of romanisation, in which し is romanised as 'si' rather than 'shi'.

    That's the bit I didn't know. While I have seen romanizations such as "syōgun" for "shōgun", I had never seen "si" for "shi".

    How many systems of romanization are there? Is there one that is more official than the others? All the textbooks I've seen — at both University 101 classes and at Soko Gakuen — use shi and sho rather than is and syo.

  5. Michele Sharik said,

    June 18, 2018 @ 12:39 am

    Hmmm, I could have sworn I replied to Brian Datsun's comment this morning, but I don't see it now. So, here it is again:

    Brian wrote:
    > Nissin in hiragana is にっしん – the sokuon (small 'tsu') explains why the 's' is doubled.

    Yeah, I got that. I can read kana, albeit slowly. :-)

    > As for the missing 'h', I guess Nissin prefers the Nihon-shiki system of romanisation, in which し is romanised as 'si' rather than 'shi'.

    That was the missing piece of my puzzle. I'm only really familiar with the system that was used in my University 101/102 classes and those used at Soko Gakuen (Soko = San Francisco), which uses shi rather than si.

    That said, I have seen syo used for sho, but only very rarely. I guess I didn't realize there was more than one official romanization system in use today.

  6. Mike K said,

    June 21, 2018 @ 7:58 pm

    To expand very slightly on what Brian said, a lot of Japanese companies still use (or are in the process of transitioning out of) the Nihon-shiki/Kunrei-shiki system. Mitutoyo (Mitsutoyo in Hepburn) is a relatively famous example, they make high quality calipers and other measuring instruments.

    After WWII there was pressure from the Allies to use more Hepburn but there was resistance (as one can expect).

    There's a quite recent movement to using Hepburn for some foreigner-targeted publications, I'm not sure to what extent it's a legal requirement or not, but Mitutoyo is listed as Mitsutoyo in the Tokyo yellow pages according to their wikipedia page :)

RSS feed for comments on this post