Creative Naming Revelation

[Ubergeek]

Something I just noticed. If you take Kubota and rearange the syllables in his name, you get Botaku, a type of wooden sword. Go Rich Berlew! Wo0t!

[reorith]

oh man and if you rearrange the letters in ubergeek, you get rugbeeek. i fail to see your point.

[Logalmier]

I have always admired Rich Burlews ability to make up name that suit his characters so well, I'm always having problems with that, just a question though, is it an Asian sword or something like that? If not then I don't really see what your point is.:smallconfused:

[Trazoi]

If you rearrange the letters in Redcloak, you get Cake Lord! That's got to foreshadow something...

Also, if you rearrange the letters in Monster in the Darkness, you can get "Mister North Nakedness". Umm, not sure about that one. :smallbiggrin:

[Logalmier]

If you rearrange the letters in Redcloak, you get Cake Lord! That's got to foreshadow something...

Also, if you rearrange the letters in Monster in the Darkness, you can get "Mister North Nakedness". Umm, not sure about that one. :smallbiggrin:

No, not really (but yeah, "Cake Lord" has got to mean something there).

[Chronos]

You do know, do you not, that "Kubota" is a real name? Apparently, it's a company that makes tractors, among other things.

And while we're at it, Tokyo, the current capital of Japan, is a re-arrangement of Kyoto, the ancient capital. That one's pure coincidence, too. Japanese is just more prone to anagrams than English, that's all.

[Spiky]

Anagrams...in other languages? With completely unassociated alphabets? Could possibly be coincidental. Maybe.

[Arkenputtyknife]

You do know, do you not, that "Kubota" is a real name? Apparently, it's a company that makes tractors, among other things.
My copy of enamdict lists three different versions of it as a name: 久保多, 久保田, 窪田. That's in addition to its normal use as a word, 凹田, meaning “rice field in a low place”.


And while we're at it, Tokyo, the current capital of Japan, is a re-arrangement of Kyoto, the ancient capital. That one's pure coincidence, too. Japanese is just more prone to anagrams than English, that's all.
Only half a coincidence, really. Kyoto = 京都 “capital metropolis”; Tokyo = 東京 “east capital”. But yes, the syllabic nature of Japanese, combined with the complications that resulted from importing thousands of Chinese names (whose pronunciations had to be simplified to fit Japanese), has entertaining consequences.


Anagrams...in other languages? With completely unassociated alphabets? Could possibly be coincidental. Maybe.
Japanese can be mapped syllable by syllable onto groups of Roman letters; if the old Nihonshiki system is used, the mapping is unambiguous and uniquely reversible. Japanese is also relatively free of the annoying variations in pronunciation that plague English. Since each Japanese syllabic character corresponds to one or two (sometimes three) Roman letters, re-arranging the syllabic representation of a word will usually result in a perfectly readable new word which will map onto the corresponding Roman version. Thus:

Kubota = くぼた (ku - bo - ta if you don't have a Japanese font installed)
botaku = ぼたく (bo - ta - ku)

Notice that because Japanese is syllabic, most Japanese anagrams will be pronounceable, and because of the relatively few characters needed to represent a given word (in this case, 3 instead of 6), are more likely to be real words than a random English anagram. Permuting a word in Hiragana will always produce something that can be rendered into Roman letters, but the reverse is not true:

くぼた = Kubota –> oaktub (can't be accurately rendered in Japanese)
or –> ktuboa (meaningless and not readily transliteratable).

“Oaktub” can be approximated, but it would come out as something like おうくたぶ “o-kutabu”. “Ktuboa” would become something like くつぼあ “kutsuboa”.

Things get much more interesting when you start fooling around with Kanji, but that would take a much longer post.

[Trazoi]

No, not really (but yeah, "Cake Lord" has got to mean something there).
That's right - we're on to something here.

Further more, "Belkar Bitterleaf" is an anagram of "Fake Little Barber", which must be a clue of Belkar's tragic past that drove him to act the way he did. His name is also an anagram of "Likable Bat Ferret", which is a clue to a potential future.

Finally, "Order of the Stick" is an anagram of "Hoofed Trickster", which is a clear reference to either Pagan or maybe even demonic influences in the strip. It's all obvious. (Obvious that I just like having fun with anagrams ;) )

[King of Nowhere]

If you rearrange the letters in Redcloak, you get Cake Lord! That's got to foreshadow something...
Sooner or later, he will start baking cakes and selling them to get money to fund the Plan. The Plan is on a pretty tight budget.



Also, if you rearrange the letters in Monster in the Darkness, you can get "Mister North Nakedness". Umm, not sure about that one.
Clearly, under the umbrella he's naked

[Douglas Limmer]

Something I just noticed. If you take Kubota and rearange the syllables in his name, you get Botaku, a type of wooden sword. Go Rich Berlew! Wo0t!Could you possibly mean "bokutō" (or "bokutou", if your font doesn't do macrons)? I couldn't find a "botaku" meaning a wooden sword in my entire two minutes of Internet searching.

Personally, I continue to misread "Kubota" as "Kabuto", which is an entirely different legitimate Japanese word.

[mockingbyrd7]

*gasp!* Elan backwards is Nale!

Roy is Yor backwards, implying that he is actually older than he appears. He's from the times of yore!

Haley is Yelah backwards!
...yeah, I got nothing.

[Borris]

And V spelled backward is also V.
Let's keep searching: I think we're on to something.

[Kgw]

You do know, do you not, that "Kubota" is a real name? Apparently, it's a company that makes tractors, among other things.

And while we're at it, Tokyo, the current capital of Japan, is a re-arrangement of Kyoto, the ancient capital. That one's pure coincidence, too. Japanese is just more prone to anagrams than English, that's all.
Uh... nope, sorry. Tôkyô means "East capital" and Kyôto, "The capital". Remember that Japanese has fewer sounds than other languages, and they "think" in ideograms (kanji), so
凹田 (kubota) is "rice field in a low place",
凹溜まり (kubota(mari)), "hollow; pond in a hollow"
While both words sound similar, no Japanese would ever mistook one for the other -except in untranslatable jokes-, or would ever imagine that 凹田 (kubota) is 木刀 (bokutô) backwards. Nope, "botaku" doesn't exists -the Kubota tractor company yes, it does.

EDIT: Arkenputtyknife beat me... :redface:

[Echowinds]

Only half a coincidence, really. Kyoto = 京都 “capital metropolis”; Tokyo = 東京 “east capital”.

This playgrounder is correct.

[Laurentio]

And V spelled backward is also V.
Let's keep searching: I think we're on to something.
And if you reverse it up-down, it's seems a "A". More correctly, it would became a guttural "gh" in the atlantidian language of Aquaman (as he explained to Flash during their first meeting).
So, Vaarsuvius is a reverse atlantidian named Ghaarsuvius?

Oh, and not follow me, because I'm not sure of this. Not only Elan reversed is Nale (as mockingbyrd7 noticed). But if you reverse Nale... you get Elan! Really! Try yourself!

And what about Rich Burlew? "We hurl crib". Very revealing. I don't know what, but it's revealing...

Laurentio

[Nibelung]

My copy of enamdict lists three different versions of it as a name: 久保多, 久保田, 窪田. That's in addition to its normal use as a word, 凹田, meaning “rice field in a low place”.


Only half a coincidence, really. Kyoto = 京都 “capital metropolis”; Tokyo = 東京 “east capital”. But yes, the syllabic nature of Japanese, combined with the complications that resulted from importing thousands of Chinese names (whose pronunciations had to be simplified to fit Japanese), has entertaining consequences.


Japanese can be mapped syllable by syllable onto groups of Roman letters; if the old Nihonshiki system is used, the mapping is unambiguous and uniquely reversible. Japanese is also relatively free of the annoying variations in pronunciation that plague English. Since each Japanese syllabic character corresponds to one or two (sometimes three) Roman letters, re-arranging the syllabic representation of a word will usually result in a perfectly readable new word which will map onto the corresponding Roman version. Thus:

Kubota = くぼた (ku - bo - ta if you don't have a Japanese font installed)
botaku = ぼたく (bo - ta - ku)

Notice that because Japanese is syllabic, most Japanese anagrams will be pronounceable, and because of the relatively few characters needed to represent a given word (in this case, 3 instead of 6), are more likely to be real words than a random English anagram. Permuting a word in Hiragana will always produce something that can be rendered into Roman letters, but the reverse is not true:

くぼた = Kubota –> oaktub (can't be accurately rendered in Japanese)
or –> ktuboa (meaningless and not readily transliteratable).

“Oaktub” can be approximated, but it would come out as something like おうくたぶ “o-kutabu”. “Ktuboa” would become something like くつぼあ “kutsuboa”.

Things get much more interesting when you start fooling around with Kanji, but that would take a much longer post.

http://i32.tinypic.com/282dox4.jpg

[Arkenputtyknife]

Uh... nope, sorry. Tôkyô means "East capital" and Kyôto, "The capital". Remember that Japanese has fewer sounds than other languages, and they "think" in ideograms (kanji), so
凹田 (kubota) is "rice field in a low place",
凹溜まり (kubota(mari)), "hollow; pond in a hollow"
While both words sound similar, no Japanese would ever mistook one for the other -except in untranslatable jokes-,
That isn't a very good example because the words are of very unequal length, but really, the idea that a Japanese person wouldn't ever make such a mistake isn't true. Although context is usually sufficient to disambiguate homophones, often it isn't. A Japanese conversation is much more dependent on constant feedback between speaker and listener than the equivalent English conversation would be, and this is in part to make sure that speaker and listener are using the same words to mean the same things. In extreme cases, a speaker may resort to ‘writing’ the Kanji for a word on the palm of the hand with a finger to make the meaning completely clear.

There's an example of this at the start of the second episode of Tenchi Muyo! Ryo-Ohki, when Ryoko tells Tenchi, “Now I want your balls.” Since she'd been spending much of the previous episode apparently trying to slice and dice him, he has the obvious reaction, and she reacts angrily, explaining that she meant the jewels on his sword hilt. I recall checking the original Japanese a few years back, and was surprised to find that the translation was literal: the pun was exactly the same in the original, and Tenchi made the same mistake. (Cross fingers and toes in the hope that my memory isn't playing tricks on me again.)

There's a comparable problem in written Japanese, where children are first taught to write using Hiragana (くぼた) and move on to Kanji later (久保田). The Hiragana only expresses sound, whereas the Kanji expresses meaning. Both are valid ways of writing the word. Reading a passage of text written entirely in Hiragana can be very hard, in part because of the lack of disambiguation. Writing entirely in Hiragana is likely to get you regarded as semi-illiterate and provoke the angry retort, “Use some Kanji!”

The worst Japanese homophone I know of is ‘shin’, which usually means ‘new’ but (according to New Nelson) has more than 70 possible meanings. It's noticeable that the great majority of homophones are words imported from Chinese; the equivalent native Japanese words are typically much longer and less ambiguous, e.g. the native Japanese word for ‘new’ is ‘atarashii’. When Masaki Kajishima published his “Shin Tenchi Muyo” novels, the marketing campaign went to almost absurd lengths to point out that ‘shin’ in this case meant ‘true’ (真), not ‘new’ (新).


or would ever imagine that 凹田 (kubota) is 木刀 (bokutô) backwards.
Since they aren't actually anagrams (I didn't notice that until it was pointed out: bokutō = ぼくとう, not ぼくと; oops), that's true. But while I've never seen any references to anagrams in my perusals of Japanese, considering their love of word play, it's hard to believe that such things wouldn't occur to them.

Again, Tenchi Muyo. Most of the names used in the show are based on place names in Okayama Prefecture. For example, ‘Mihoshi’ is derived from ‘Bisei’. Say what? Well, it's a bit complicated, but in essence both words are ways of reading 美星. Other names were formed by taking a place name, converting it to Hiragana, then finding a different Kanji that sounds the same: ‘Kagato’, for example, came from 香登 –> かがと –> 神我人 as it's written in the show. I would expect a native Japanese speaker to recognise that 香登 and 神我人 are homophones, despite looking nothing like each other. This shows that the Japanese are able and willing to play around with words in ways that can't even be imagined in Western languages.

Hmm… checks dictionaries… seems the Japanese for “anagram” is アナグラム “anaguramu”, a loanword. There's no native word for it? Surprising.

[someonenonotyou]

hey if you rearrange vaarsuvius you get Virus Sauva but what does it mean? what is rich trying to tells us?

[InfiniteMiller]

I'm certain I don't need to draw the Vaarsuvius-Pompey connection for you tricksters.

[Arkenputtyknife]

http://i32.tinypic.com/282dox4.jpg
Yes, dear. We know.

[teratorn]

And what about Rich Burlew? "We hurl crib". Very revealing. I don't know what, but it's revealing...

Good try to divert attentions, but we found your trueself Mr. "Urinal Toe."

[Zone]

hey if you rearrange vaarsuvius you get Virus Sauva but what does it mean? what is rich trying to tells us?

O'well, lets just say that sauva is staff in finnish.

[Rollin]

I'm certain I don't need to draw the Vaarsuvius-Pompey connection for you tricksters.

:facepalm:

[Laurentio]

Good try to divert attentions, but we found your trueself Mr. "Urinal Toe."

http://www.evilmilk.com/pictures/Lold.jpg

Urinal Toe