Domain: freedict.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to freedict.com.
Comments · 7
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The name
TFA doesn't say what the name means, so after a few minutes on this internet thingy I find:
The robot is named RoboHon, which amalgamates the Japanese words for "robot" and "phone" together.and an online dictionary gives "terehon", "terefon", "denwa" as translations of "telephone".
So it is named "robophone", slightly mangled by transliteration.
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Re:Much more in Europe
According to http://www.freedict.com/onldict/onldict.php there are at least one or two if not 3 other ways to say privacy. Lots of words in Japan are thrown away for the English version likely because of perceived coolness and nothing to do with the prior existence of the idea/concept/word.
puraibashi, naisho, puraivashi-, naimitsu, naishou
Anyway to generalize for a whole nation is crazy. Some places are probably different than others.
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Re:Phobos Grunt = Doom guy
I know quite a bit of Russian, and that's news to me. According to this, Russian word for "soil" is pochva, and that's the word I'm familiar with.
Comments like this always leave me scratching my head. The second sentence is a complete non sequitur unless one has never heard of synonyms. I don't believe the author has never heard of synonyms. So what exactly were they thinking when they said this?
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Re:Phobos Grunt = Doom guy
"Grunt" is the Russian word for "soil"
I know quite a bit of Russian, and that's news to me. According to this, Russian word for "soil" is pochva, and that's the word I'm familiar with.
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Re:More interesting are the Honda plug-ins
According to this site "kishimu" is one Japanese word that translates as "jar" in English.
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Just to be precise
Democracy:
Demos = people
kratos = power
(check)
the power belongs to the people
Republic:
Res = thing
publica = public
the things (of the state, bridges, schools) belongs to everybody, as opposed to "the state belongs to the emperor|king", it is also translated as commonwealth.
(check)
Go read wikipedia definitions if you want more info.
Republic
Democracy -
Re:Sure there is...
I do not know what people are talking about. Russian most certainly has an h. The letter is 'ha' and is written like 'X'. And it is not as strong as people claim it is. Most certainly does not warrant a KH spelling. I do not know how "pizza hut" is spelled in russia, but I will guess that they do not spell it like "picca gat", as the the second word would sound too close to a russian equivalent of "asshole" (person, not actual object).
No. As others have pointed out, Cyrillic 'X' is not used as an equivalent to English 'H'. Trying to pronounce it as 'H' is probably the single most obvious sign of a native English speaker with bad pronuciation. The 'G' sound is routinely used in place of 'H' in foreign words.
Like the Greek hero Gerkules.
No, really. Look it up.
So, yeah, it comes out sounding funny, but transliteration is a mess anyway, and the sort of marketing types who get wigged out about branding and name recognition and such deserve to be made to look silly from time to time. Like the ultra-plural Dunkin Donuts ended up with because they weren't willing to drop the 's'...