Meaning of 零さん?

[MASAKI Haruka]

Hi.

零さん's "san" don't means "Mr."
"零す" is a verb that it's means "spill."

"零さん" is a kind of inflections "零す" means "don't spill" or a statement of willingness to spill.
The latter is a less modern phrase.

I think "Kousoban" is good.
It doesn't make sense in Japanese, but it is very close in sound to "Soukoban", and the name starts with a K.

I hope this is helpful.

On Sun, 02 Oct 2022 18:07:46 +0200
"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
> 
>