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Would be interesting to read story about naming :)
by EugeneOZ 10y ago
Would be interesting to read story about naming :)
- adwhit 10y agoIt's a little underwhelming: [0] I enjoyed visiting Tokio (Tokyo) the city and I liked the "io" suffix and how it plays w/ Mio as well. I don't know... naming is hard so I didn't spend too much time thinking about it. [0]https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/4vzomj/announcing_tokio_a_finagle_inspired_network/d62svqf/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/4vzomj/announcing_tok...
- steveklabnik 10y ago"Tokio" is one way to romanize 東京, the capital of Japan. [1] "Tokyo" is more accurate in a sense, and so is more popular today, but doesn't contain the I/O pun. The logo also references its metropolitan crest. [2]. 1: http://english.stackexchange.com/a/207016 http://english.stackexchange.com/a/207016 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbols_of_Tokyo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbols_of_Tokyo
- wccrawford 10y agoIt's a really odd way, though, since "kyo" is a single syllable in Japanese and not pronounced "kee oh" like most English speakers do.
- steveklabnik 10y agoI edited my post with a link to some history, you might want to check it out. As someone with very limited 日本語 skills, I find this stuff very fascinating. (And yes, un-learning kyo vs kee-ooh was tough...)
- wccrawford 10y agoYeah, I think I still say it wrong sometimes. To me, it's a word I learned in English, and so I think of it the English way. In that way, loan-words are troublesome in both English and Japanese for words from both languages. Don't even get me started about learning French words in either of them and then learning their pronunciation in the other, and then the actual French. As an example, the Atelier game series.
- grzm 10y agoI don't know if it's entirely correct to call it wrong. The nearer a word comes to its equivalent in its source language, the higher the expectation that it's pronounced the same as the source language. This expectation is arguably correct when the word is not commonly used in the host language. Some words are very different. Germany/Deutschland. Florence/Firenze. Some are closer, even having the same spelling: Mexico/Mexico. I don't think it's not wrong per se to pronounce it the way its typically pronounced in the language you're speaking.
- grzm 10y agoI've seen it spelled Tokio in French references. And at the end of the day, it's a name. They can spell it however they want.
- wccrawford 10y agoThey can, and they're hardly the first. But it's very jarring to some people.
- EugeneOZ 10y agoRussian speakers also pronounce "kee oh", so "io" part was obvious for me :) Now I will pronounce it correct. Live and learn.
- Nadya 10y agoNot very different from hiding the 'u' in romanization. Tokyo and Toukyou are not equivalent, but are treated as such. とうきょう 「漢字：東京」 is the capital. 「ときょ」is gibberish and doesn't exist.
- wyldfire 10y agoshrug, aren't the cues provided by transliteration mostly for the sake of the English speakers (or at least non-Japanese speakers)? If so, the distinction won't matter.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jdmichal 10y agoIt's not really as far off as you would think, since /j/ and /i/ are the same semivowel. As a single syllable, it's /kjo/ or /k ̯io/. As two syllables, it's /ki.o/.
- slobotron 10y agoAppropriate domain name given that in Serbian it's spelled Tokio as well. (.rs being TLD of Republic of Serbia)
- acjohnson55 10y agoThere's also another project by the name of Tokyo: http://fallabs.com/tokyocabinet/ http://fallabs.com/tokyocabinet/
- kazinator 10y agoSorry, no. Tokyo is not a correct romanization of the metropolis' name. It is rather an exonym. Romanization is a way of unambigously encoding Japanese into the roman alphabet. One method gives us "toukyou". Another system uses diacritics for long vowels. "Tokio" is a different word. tokio -- ときお (to ki o) toukyou -- とうきょう (tō kyō: this is Tokyo) tokyo -- ときょ (to kyo) Note that ō loses an orthographic nuance, since it can denote either おう or おお.
- grzm 10y agoI understand that your parent may be misusing the word romanization, though the intent of his comment is clear. The name of the capital of Japan (東京) is spelled differently in different languages, Tokyo and Tokio being two of them. If you're going to be strict with respect to romanization and use accents, isn't the circumflex used to indicate long vowels, at least in Kunrei? So, Tôkyô? Or in Hepburn, the macron? Tōkyō? I've never come across acute being used for this.
- kazinator 10y agoFixed that now. I was being lazy and hadn't noticed that Hacker's Keyboard provides ō, right there in the same long-press menu for o where I had obtained ó.
- GolDDranks 10y agoTokio is also an exonym for 東京 – in many languages other than English. While the spelling overlaps with how 「ときお」 (whatever that means) would be romanized, the author himself told the name got its inspiration from the metropolis of Tokyo. Edit: By the way, your idea of "unambiguously" encoding Japanese doesn't hold water. Written Japanese is written in a mixture of kanji and kana, and no romanization system does round-trip the kanji. You could say that (good) romanization systems unambiguously encode the pronunciation, but that isn't true either: in addition to the fact that encoding "pronunciation" of written language is problematic in principle, there are the pitch accents that aren't captured by kana. But we're digressing. If you give up the "unambiguous", "tokyo" is a perfectly good romanization for 東京.
- bschwindHN 10y agoI prefer the alternate reality where it stands for TOKen IO. Mio uses tokens at its core so I think that name works well.