(Note: this post contains non-ASCII characters. In the past,
Usenet has not always handled such things gracefully. Hopefully
these days it can. I guess we'll find out...)
I've been able to trace back the Japanese for most of NetHack's
samurai-specific words.
刀 (かたな) - origin of the English word "katana"
脇差し (わきざし) - short sword
忍者刀 (にんじゃとう) - ninja sword (literally: stealthy person sword)
薙刀 (なぎなた) - long sword or halberd
ヌンチャク - precise etymology unknown, but Japan got it from Okinawa
鍛鋼 (たんこう) - forged steel
兜 (かぶと) - helmet
箏 (こと) - 13-stringed zither
酒 (さけ) - alcohol in general or Japanese rice liquor in particular
弓掛け or 弓懸け (both pronounced ゆがけ) - archer's glove
The closest I can find for shito is this:
小刀 (しょうとう) - small knife
That would be quite a stretch on the transliteration, so it's
possible that the devs had something different in mind.
That leaves osaku and gunyoki. Setting osaku to one side
for the time being, here are the variations I have considered
for gunyoki:
ぐんよき - not in dictionary
ぐうんよき - not in dictionary
ぐんようき -- 軍用機 (warplane), probably unrelated
ぐうんようき - not in dictionary
ぐんよきい - not in dictionary
ぐうんよきい - not in dictionary
ぐんようきい - not in dictionary
ぐうんようきい - not in dictionary
ぐにょき - not in dictionary
ぐうにょき - not in dictionary
ぐにょうき - not in dictionary
ぐうにょうき - not in dictionary
ぐにょきい - not in dictionary
ぐうにょきい - not in dictionary
ぐにょうきい - not in dictionary
ぐうにょうきい - not in dictionary
Then I started grasping at straws...
ぐんにょき - not in dictionary
ぐうんにょき - not in dictionary
ぐんにょうき - not in dictionary
ぐうんにょうき - not in dictionary
ぐんにょきい - not in dictionary
ぐうんにょきい - not in dictionary
ぐんにょうきい - not in dictionary
ぐうんにょうきい - not in dictionary
Web searches for gunyoki turn up two kinds of results:
references to the NetHack samurai role, and places
people who have used "gunyoki" as a username on
various websites. I'm guessing most of the people in
this latter category have played NetHack. Some of
the results in the former category appear to indicate
that native-Japanese-speaking NetHack players don't
know what it means either.
So, I've still got nothing on the etymology of "gunyoki".
Is it some kind of pre-Meiji word that my dicationary
omits because it doesn't occur in modern Japanese?
Did the NetHack devs make it up out of whole cloth?
Can anybody clue me in here?
I know it doesn't matter. I'm just... curious.
I haven't seriously attempted to figure out osaku
yet, so it's still possible I'll find that one.
> So, I've still got nothing on the etymology of "gunyoki".
> Is it some kind of pre-Meiji word that my dicationary
> omits because it doesn't occur in modern Japanese?
> Did the NetHack devs make it up out of whole cloth?
> Can anybody clue me in here?
> I know it doesn't matter. I'm just... curious.
> I haven't seriously attempted to figure out osaku
> yet, so it's still possible I'll find that one.
There's the following entry in the in-game encyclopedia, data.base:
gunyoki
The samurai's last meal before battle. It was usually made
up of cooked chestnuts, dried seaweed, and sake.
Still doesn't say where the definition came from, but it's a precise
enough definition that you might be able to find the word the other way
round, by searching for the definition and trying to find a word that
matches.
Since nothing there has anything whatsoever to do
with food of any kind (both references to the manuscript
refer to its illustrations of warfare), I'm guessing that's
probably completely unrelated.
(Unrelated words transliterating to the same Hepburn
bastardization is way more likely than you may think
if you haven't studied Japanese. In the first place, an
abnormally high percentage of Japanese words have
multiple homophones, compared to any Western
language. When written, words may be distinguished
by using different Chinese characters (kanji), but in
the spoken language they sound identical. This is
very common in Japanese. On top of that, Hepburn
romanization is highly lossy: upthread, I listed sixteen
distinct Japanese pronunciations that would all come
out "gunyoki" when transliterated. A Japanese
person would NOT consider them to be the same.
The "gunyoki" in NetHack could be taken from any
of those sixteen pronunciations if it was transliterated
normally. I added eight more that would be possible
if the transliteration were a little loose, and there are
indeed possibilities beyond that.
> > So, I've still got nothing on the etymology of "gunyoki".
> > Is it some kind of pre-Meiji word that my dicationary
> > omits because it doesn't occur in modern Japanese?
> > Did the NetHack devs make it up out of whole cloth?
> > Can anybody clue me in here?
> > I know it doesn't matter. I'm just... curious.
> > I haven't seriously attempted to figure out osaku
> > yet, so it's still possible I'll find that one.
> There's the following entry in the in-game encyclopedia, data.base:
> gunyoki
> The samurai's last meal before battle. It was usually made
> up of cooked chestnuts, dried seaweed, and sake.
> Still doesn't say where the definition came from, but it's a precise
> enough definition that you might be able to find the word the other way
> round, by searching for the definition and trying to find a word that
> matches.
However, there is no transliterated Japanese word given
there as the name for such a meal.
My Japanese isn't really good enough to search for it on the
Japanese web, although as noted there are indications that
the Japanese NetHack community doesn't recognize the
word as being Japanese at all. See e.g. here:
http://www.gameskb.com/Uwe/Forum.aspx/games-nethack/4587/FYI-Samurai-...
Changing "gun" to "gan" is what a native Japanese
speaker would do if it were an English word of
Germanic origin with the Anglo-Saxon short u sound
like in "bus". Compare the Japanese rendering of the
popular restaurant chain "Pizza Hat". (The short A
in "hat" is another sound they don't have. Both of
them end up as ア, the first vowel in the Japanese
sound system. The closest equivalent in English
to that sound is the A in "father". Any time any
Japanese person uses the letter "A", this is the
sound they mean.)
From their adoption of this transliteration, it would
appear that the people who adapted NetHack to
Japanese not only didn't know what a "gunyoki"
was but also guessed that it must not be Japanese
in origin at all. (If the word came from Japanese,
it should theoretically be pronounced with the long
U sound like in "tube". That's the only Japanese
sound that normally gets transliterated to U. The
short u as in "bus" does not occur in Japanese at
all. Native Japanese speakers as a rule cannot
pronounce it unless they have had very extensive
exposure to native speakers of foreign languages.
If they hear a Westerner pronounce short u, it
sounds the same to them as their first vowel.
Taking anything back and forth between English
and Japanese is inherently a messy proposition,
because both the phonemic inventory and also
the phonotactics of the two languages are very
much different.)
> From their adoption of this transliteration, it would
> appear that the people who adapted NetHack to
> Japanese not only didn't know what a "gunyoki"
> was but also guessed that it must not be Japanese
> in origin at all.
Indeed, they did not recognize it as a Japanese word at all.
From long ago, konbu was considered something for good luck and was called "Hirome" or "Ebisu-me". Even now, it is used for decoration at unveiling ceremonies or weddings. Samurais sent Noshi-awabi (thin, long strip of dried abalone), Kachi-guri (dried chestnuts) and konbu because when the three are put together in Japanese, the words sound like "To shoot, defeat the enemy and be happy about it".
Does this get it any closer? Could "gunyoki" be a corrupted form of a chant meaning "let's eat, fight and be merry" or something like that?
> Samurais sent Noshi-awabi, Kachi-guri, and
> konbu because when the three are put together
> in Japanese, the words sound like "To shoot,
> defeat the enemy and be happy about it".
> Does this get it any closer? Could "gunyoki"
> be a corrupted form of a chant meaning "let's
> eat, fight and be merry" or something like that?
I can't come up with any way to form a crassis
from noshiawabi, kachiguri, and konbu so that
it sounds very much like gunyoki. Can you?
Do you have specific Japanese wording in mind
for the chant that would sound anything like
gunyoki?
Enemy could be 敵 (かたき), which possibly
sounds a little like kachi, if you squint, but I
don't know how it would fit into gunyoki.
Shoot is probably a form of 射る (いる).
Depending on how you conjugate that, it
could sound like various things. (The
first mora, い, is the only really constant
part of the word. The る changes to
various things with conjugation.) "Shoot
the enemy" could sound like kachiguri,
particularly in informal Japanese where
you can omit the accusative particle (を).
It'd be a stretch (among other things, the
G sound in kachiguri has to be ignored
entirely), but Japanese puns are often a
bit of a stretch like that. It's plausible.
The rest is harder to reconstruct. Japanese
has a lot of words for the idea of defeating
someone, so there's not really a lot of help
there. Happy is even worse that way: it
could be anything.
Without knowing the Japanese chant that
the food writer had in mind, it's hard to
say how it could end up mangled into
anything resembling "gunyoki".
>> Samurais sent Noshi-awabi, Kachi-guri, and
>> konbu because when the three are put together
>> in Japanese, the words sound like "To shoot,
>> defeat the enemy and be happy about it".
>> Does this get it any closer? Could "gunyoki"
>> be a corrupted form of a chant meaning "let's
>> eat, fight and be merry" or something like that?
>I can't come up with any way to form a crassis
>from noshiawabi, kachiguri, and konbu so that
>it sounds very much like gunyoki. Can you?
>Do you have specific Japanese wording in mind
>for the chant that would sound anything like
>gunyoki?
>Enemy could be ? (???), which possibly
>sounds a little like kachi, if you squint, but I
>don't know how it would fit into gunyoki.
>Shoot is probably a form of ?? (??).
>Depending on how you conjugate that, it
>could sound like various things. (The
>first mora, ?, is the only really constant
>part of the word. The ? changes to
>various things with conjugation.) "Shoot
>the enemy" could sound like kachiguri,
>particularly in informal Japanese where
>you can omit the accusative particle (?).
>It'd be a stretch (among other things, the
>G sound in kachiguri has to be ignored
>entirely), but Japanese puns are often a
>bit of a stretch like that. It's plausible.
>The rest is harder to reconstruct. Japanese
>has a lot of words for the idea of defeating
>someone, so there's not really a lot of help
>there. Happy is even worse that way: it
>could be anything.
>Without knowing the Japanese chant that
>the food writer had in mind, it's hard to
>say how it could end up mangled into
>anything resembling "gunyoki".
So I wonder how many other managled (non)words there are being used in
the Samurai's overall game.
PS I wonder what Japanese players thought about the errors; I know NH
is semi-popular there among roguelike players, to the point of having
their own NH branches (not sure if they're still being maintained,
unlike vanilla).
On Monday, October 29, 2012 10:16:09 PM UTC+9, Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:
> That leaves osaku and gunyoki.
I always assumed gunyoki began 軍用 (ぐんよう),
"military use". The ki could be a mistake
from 軍用品 (ぐんようひん) "military stores", or
軍用金 (ぐんようきん) "military funds", or it
could be some (possibly antiquated) military
jargon that really does translate directly to
rations.
As other people suggested, no Japanese NetHack players can figure out
what "gunyoki" is. The nearest candidate is "gan-yaku 丸薬" (as
already suggested too), a ball-shaped medicine, which is taken from
mouth and would fit as a possession for a ninja. We can imagine that
it is intended for "hyou-rou-gan 兵糧丸", a ball-shaped ration, so
Japanese NetHack took the word as the translation for "gunyoki".
"Osaku" would be "saku 鑿", a ninja tool for lockpicking.
Somehow the prefix for polite expression "o-" is attached to it.
"Tanko 短甲" is literally "short-armor". This is a body (torso) armor
made of iron, leather or wood. It is used in older age than samurai
appears in Japanese history, so I'm not sure it fits for samurai aspect.
"Shito" is also an unknown word for Japanese, but JNetHack translates
it as "sasuga 刺刀" by guessing "shito" is direct pronounce of "shi 刺"
and "to 刀". But it is not precisely correct, since sasuga is rather
identical to wakizashi.
On Nov 1, 12:29 am, Alex Shinn <alexsh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I always assumed gunyoki began 軍用 (ぐんよう),
Now, THAT makes sense. I didn't know that word,
and my dictionary searches didn't turn it up because
I was looking for the whole thing.
That leaves the ki to explain...
> The ki could be a mistake from 軍用品
> (ぐんようひん) "military stores",
Vaguely possible, but turning ひん into ki is pretty weird.
> or 軍用金 (ぐんようきん) "military funds",
Also vaguely possible (and no weirder a mangling
than getting shito out of しょうとう), but the meaning
is a bit of a loose correspondance.
> or it could be some (possibly antiquated) military
> jargon that really does translate directly to
> rations.
The ki part could also be significantly abbreviated.
In context with 軍用, one syllable might have been
enough to communicate a longer word or even an
entire phrase. Japanese does that. Alternately,
it could be an on reading (possibly not the most
common one) for a character that more often uses
its kun reading when having the meaning intended
for gunyoki.
One possibility is 基軸 (きじく), which leaves the
part about its being a food ration to be inferred.
A larger phrase like 軍用基軸食事 or whatnot could
have been shortened to the first five morae, which,
after the Hepburn treatment, would give us gunyoki.
> The nearest candidate is "gan-yaku 丸薬" (as already
> suggested too), a ball-shaped medicine, which is taken from
That wouldn't have come over as gunyoki, though.
Linguistically, it doesn't make any sense. The Japanese
NetHack translators were just grasping at straws here.
> "Osaku" would be "saku 鑿", a ninja tool for lockpicking.
> Somehow the prefix for polite expression "o-" is attached to it.
That one I can believe.
> "Tanko 短甲" is literally "short-armor".
That too, maybe.
> It is used in older age than samurai appears in Japanese
> history, so I'm not sure it fits for samurai aspect.
The samurai tradition sort of appropriates all the earlier
Japanese martial traditions, however, especially in fiction.
On Oct 31, 9:47 pm, Rob Cypher <bals...@aol.com> wrote:
> PS I wonder what Japanese players thought about the errors;
Anybody who deals with both Japanese and English knows
that going from one to the other is frequently going to lead to
results that are at best a very rough approximation of the
original.
I mean, just for example, how do you translate よろしく
into English, or transliterate the name "Earl" into kana?
>> It is used in older age than samurai appears in Japanese
>> history, so I'm not sure it fits for samurai aspect.
> The samurai tradition sort of appropriates all the earlier
> Japanese martial traditions, however, especially in fiction.
Nethack seems to pull from the Toshiro Mifume movies more than from
reality. When drawing from western myths that was deliberate. When I
think of samurai armor in Nethack I do think in terms of the Samurai
Trilogy version with Toshiro Mifume starting out with scavenged antique
equipment.
>> The samurai tradition sort of appropriates all the earlier
>> Japanese martial traditions, however, especially in fiction.
> Nethack seems to pull from the Toshiro Mifume movies more than from
> reality. When drawing from western myths that was deliberate. When I
> think of samurai armor in Nethack I do think in terms of the Samurai
> Trilogy version with Toshiro Mifume starting out with scavenged antique
> equipment.
When you spoke of "Toshiro Mifune [samurai] movies" I first associated
those famous ones directed by Akira Kurosawa[*] in the 1950's. In most
of those movies the samurai (Toshiro Mifune) was wearing something that
looked like studded leather (or even worse), while a plate mail (tanko)
he wore (AFAIR) at the end of one of the movies for a representative
outfit. The main impression here was that he was not depicted a heroic
warrior armoured like a tank.[**]
But when you say "Samurai Trilogy" you seem to be referring to movies
(which I don't know) from Hiroshi Inagaki? - Are those films different
in that respect; is the role he's playing there more of a tank-warrior?
Janis
[*] Many of his films have been remade (in the Western context, though)
by (also famous) US-American directors.
On Nov 2, 1:21 pm, Doug Freyburger <dfrey...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > The samurai tradition sort of appropriates all the earlier
> > Japanese martial traditions, however, especially in fiction.
> Nethack seems to pull from the Toshiro Mifume
> movies more than from reality.
I'd not previously heard of Toshiro Mifume (I'm not
much of a movie buff), but I had gathered that
NetHack was based much more on references
to various works of fiction than on anything real.
This tendency is not specific to the Samurai role.
In fiction, "samurai" and "ninja" both tend to get
expanded to include pretty much any pre-firearms
Japanese military tradition or mythology the writer
happens to have ever read about, plus in some
cases Chinese and other Asian ideas as well.
"Karate" gets similar treatment in some movies,
incorporating any martial the script writer has
ever seen, even if it's from India or Brazil, plus
whatever the choreographers think would look
cool in a fight scene, even if it's entirely made
up out of whole cloth and violates several major
laws of physics into the bargain.
On Sat, 2012-11-03, Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:
...
> "Karate" gets similar treatment in some movies,
> incorporating any martial the script writer has
> ever seen, even if it's from India or Brazil, plus
> whatever the choreographers think would look
> cool in a fight scene
I think that /was/ true, up until the 1980s (the "Karate Kid" movies).
Then they realized it would be even /cooler/ if the fighting style
wasn't something you've heard of before, but the teachings of some
obscure monk in the mountains of Laos, or something ...
(Nethack does the right thing here and never claims the Monk is doing
karate or anything else likely to go out of fashion.)
/Jorgen
-- // Jorgen Grahn <grahn@ Oo o. . .
\X/ snipabacken.se> O o .
On Friday, November 2, 2012 10:34:49 AM UTC-4, Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:
> One possibility is 基軸 (きじく), which leaves the
> part about its being a food ration to be inferred.
> A larger phrase like 軍用基軸食事 or whatnot could
> have been shortened to the first five morae, which,
> after the Hepburn treatment, would give us gunyoki.
Even four: 軍用基軸, which Google Translate says means "military reserve".
I don't know if "reserve" in this context works in Japanese though,
or if Google's translation is even tenable.
you...@cds.ne.jp writes:
> As other people suggested, no Japanese NetHack players can figure out
> what "gunyoki" is.
My wife made gnocchi for dinner a few nights ago, and it made me recall
this thread. Maybe Nethack samurai are Italian somehow, or at least
their rations are.
Janis Papanagnou wrote:
> Doug Freyburger wrote:
>> Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:
>>> The samurai tradition sort of appropriates all the earlier
>>> Japanese martial traditions, however, especially in fiction.
>> Nethack seems to pull from the Toshiro Mifume movies more than from
>> reality. When drawing from western myths that was deliberate. When I
>> think of samurai armor in Nethack I do think in terms of the Samurai
>> Trilogy version with Toshiro Mifume starting out with scavenged antique
>> equipment.
> When you spoke of "Toshiro Mifune [samurai] movies" I first associated
> those famous ones directed by Akira Kurosawa[*] in the 1950's. In most
> of those movies the samurai (Toshiro Mifune) was wearing something that
> looked like studded leather (or even worse), while a plate mail (tanko)
> he wore (AFAIR) at the end of one of the movies for a representative
> outfit. The main impression here was that he was not depicted a heroic
> warrior armoured like a tank.[**]
Kurosawa directed many movies starring Mifume.
> But when you say "Samurai Trilogy" you seem to be referring to movies
> (which I don't know) from Hiroshi Inagaki? - Are those films different
> in that respect; is the role he's playing there more of a tank-warrior?
See http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047444/ for the first trilogy. I think
more historical. It's the history of Miamoto Musashi arguably the most
famous samurai ever.
> [*] Many of his films have been remade (in the Western context, though)
> by (also famous) US-American directors.
I never heard of that[*] and, frankly, couldn't notice. Maybe there really
isn't more than just the "inspiration" mentioned in Wikipedia[**], but that
seems to cover mostly film-technical practises, and vaguely the plot[***],
but the latter is arguable; for a critical statement of that view I also
found [****].
I also like "Yojimbo", remade as "A Fistful of Dollars"; I was surprised
when I not long ago saw "Last Man Standing", which is a "Yojimbo" remake
as well.
