Re: Meaning of 零さん?

[Yoko Parks]

Change the San to chan to make it a bit less gendered.


Yoko

On Sun, Oct 2, 2022, 9:08 AM Friedrich W. H. Kossebau <kossebau ＠ kde.org>
wrote:

> こんにちは,
>
> may I ask you for some native language speaker input on a proposal for a
> game
> app name based on the Japanese language?
>
> For both legal and respect reasons the game app currently named KSokoban
> (see
> https://apps.kde.org/ksokoban) should find a new name not conflicting
> with the
> original game's name Sokoban (倉庫番), given the original game is still
> around
> and alive (see https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%80%89%E5%BA%AB%E7%95%AA).
> And yes, KSokoban is an old game developed in the KDE community, but had
> no
> official release all the time since KDE 3. But currently a new release is
> prepared, with the code now using Qt5 & KF5. And thus we came across this
> challenge.
>
> The new name should still have some reference to the original name, given
> it
> has become the generic name for this game principle for many.
>
> One of the ideas how to get to a new name was to take the latin character
> variant of the name, reshuffle the characters and map the result onto
> another
> Japanese name that makes some sense in relation to the game.
> Due to lack of own real knowledge of the Japanese language that was
> approached
> by creating possible sets of Japanese sylables/moras in latin characters
> and
> asking translation services (like jisho.org) to come up with a Japanese
> word
> matching that :)
>
> Sadly that yield little, only one seemed like a candidate which though
> needs
> sanity checking by those actually understanding Japanese :)
>
> For "ko" "bo" "san" the match was 零さん. While the suffix "san" I remember
> to be
> a male person addressing part (like "Mr."), the 零 part I have no clue
> about,
> only was inspired what the dictionary said this character itself to mean
> (in
> English): zero.
>
> So I wonder if 零さん would mean or at least could be understood as the
> Japanese
> equivalent of an English "Mr. Zero"?
> Or would it mean something totally different and be unfit here?
>
> A name with a meaning of "Mr. Zero" might work for the game in that either
> "zero" references a person with total failure because one always blocking
> one-
> self (getting "zero" done) or that it references a person completing all
> work
> down to zero boxes left to push at their place (leaving "zero" behind).
> That
> ambivalence might also offer identity both for people suffering to solve
> levels as well as those just walking through it without any problems :)
>
> So, would "Kobosan" work as a name with sane Japanese meaning?
>
> Would you perhaps have other ideas for a name based on the name-estimation
> principle (shuffle-latin-characters-and-map-reversely) described above?
>
> See general name discussion here:
> https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-games-devel/2022-August/015427.html
>
> Cheers
> Friedrich
>
>
>
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