Re: Meaning of 零さん?

[Ryuichi Yamada]

Guten tag,

零さん - Kobosan could be understood as a declaration of one's will not to 
spill something, in some dialects.

The character 零 means zero when it is read as "rei."  You might want to 
see the related Wiktionary page: 
(https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%9B%B6#Japanese)

It does not follow the principle, but I would like to suggest Kuraban - 
蔵番, which means basically the same thing as Sokoban - 倉庫番.


Ryuichi Yamada

On 2022/10/03 1:07, Friedrich W. H. Kossebau 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
>
>