Etymology of the word "gunyoki"

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

(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.

[rpresser]

> So, I've still got nothing on the etymology of "gunyoki".

I found a reference to "the Gunyoki manuscript of the 14th century" http://zateev.net/ontarget/bodies/ancient.html

[rpresser]

On Monday, October 29, 2012 10:44:50 AM UTC-4, rpresser wrote:
> > So, I've still got nothing on the etymology of "gunyoki".
>
>
>
> I found a reference to "the Gunyoki manuscript of the 14th century" http://zateev.net/ontarget/bodies/ancient.html

Same manuscript apparently mentioned in this book
http://books.google.com/books?id=ZzIXkFec0e8C&pg=PA29&dq=Gunyoki&hl=en&sa=X&ei=lJaOUPqiCu200AH7hIDIDw&ved=0CF0Q6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=Gunyoki&f=false

[rpresser]

However, see this:
http://www.gameskb.com/Uwe/Forum.aspx/games-nethack/4587/FYI-Samurai-item-name-article
And this
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/ita/20040826#p3

[ais523]

Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:
> 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.

--
ais523

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

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.

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

I found a reference to the meal here:
http://www.e-reading.org.ua/bookreader.php/88251/Rowland_-_Bundori__A_Novel_Of_Japan.html
(Search within the page for chestnuts and you'll find it.)

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-item-name-article

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.)

[rpresser]

> 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.

https://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.hack/msg/2de58babecc5c71e?dmode=source&output=gplain&noredirect

[rpresser]

http://www.kuidaore-osaka.com/en/roots/konbu.html

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?

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

On Oct 30, 12:05 am, rpresser <rpres...@gmail.com> wrote:
> http://www.kuidaore-osaka.com/en/roots/konbu.html
>
> 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".

[Rob Cypher]

On Wed, 31 Oct 2012 03:40:53 -0700 (PDT), Jonadab the Unsightly One
<jonadab.the...@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Oct 30, 12:05 am, rpresser <rpres...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> http://www.kuidaore-osaka.com/en/roots/konbu.html
>>
>> 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).

[Alex Shinn]

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.

Osaku could be お削, a plane/sharpener.

--
Alex

[you...@cds.ne.jp]

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.

--
youkan

[rpresser]

On Wednesday, October 31, 2012 6:40:54 AM UTC-4, Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:
>
> 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?

I definitely do not have anything in mind; I
speak no Japanese myself. I was just grasping
at straws.

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

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.

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

On Nov 1, 12:42 am, you...@cds.ne.jp wrote:
> 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.

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

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?

[Doug Freyburger]

Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:

> you...@cds.ne.jp wrote:
>
>> "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.

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.

[Janis Papanagnou]

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.

[**] tank vs. tanko - unintended pun.

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

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.

[Jorgen Grahn]

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 .

[rpresser]

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.

[Sean McAfee]

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.

[Doug Freyburger]

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.

The Hidden Fortress http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051808/ is suggested as
an inspriation for Star Wars. Many others are cowboy movies. Perhaps
my favorite is Seven Samurai http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047478/ done
as the classic western The Magnificant Seven
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054047/

> [**] tank vs. tanko - unintended pun.

The Dev Team thinks of everything ...

[Janis Papanagnou]

On 04.11.2012 02:14, Doug Freyburger wrote:
>
> The Hidden Fortress http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051808/ is suggested as
> an inspriation for Star Wars.

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 [****].

> Many others are cowboy movies. Perhaps
> my favorite is Seven Samurai http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047478/ done
> as the classic western The Magnificant Seven
> http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054047/

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.

Here's a couple more listed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remakes_of_films_by_Akira_Kurosawa

Janis

[*] Which is not too surprising, since I am not that a star wars fan (to
say the least).

[**] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hidden_Fortress

[***] But the actual plot might not even reflect that; the quote in [**]
talks only about the "original plot outline".

[****]
http://hollywoodhumiliation.blogspot.de/2010/03/star-wars-vs-hidden-fortress-myth.html

[B. R. 'BeAr' Ederson]

On Mon, 29 Oct 2012 06:16:08 -0700 (PDT), Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:

> I've been able to trace back the Japanese for most of NetHack's
> samurai-specific words.

[...]

> I've still got nothing on the etymology of "gunyoki".

I don't speak any Japanese, at all. But maybe, that's the reason
that I may think of another possibility, altogether:

/Maybe/, someone read somewhere the description of the final
Samurai meal, that nowadays pops up on many different internet
sites, e.g. http://onlinesamurai.weebly.com/food.html.

And assuming, in parentheses after this description was the word
Gunyoki (as in 軍用記). According to online translation, this will
be a "military account" and would be there as source citation for
above mentioned meal.

The one taking the word into Nethack may have mistaken the /citation/
for the /name/ of the meal. Just guessing wild... ;-)

BeAr
--
===========================================================================
= What do you mean with: "Perfection is always an illusion"? =
===============================================================--(Oops!)===

[you...@cds.ne.jp]

> 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.

Ah, I totally agree. What I can imagine from the word 'gunyoki' as
food is gnocci. :)

[you...@cds.ne.jp]

Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:

> 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.

If we can put it aside that 'gunyoki' is a word something related to
samurai, and just think about that it is a military food ration,
the first thought is 'gun-yo-shoku 軍用食(ぐんようしょく)'.
It is the word which is almost identical to 'military food ration',
though the word sounds that it is used by a modern army, not by
a medieval army. (For a medieval samurai army, it is suitable for
'hyou-rou 兵糧(ひょうろう)'.)
One of pronounces for the kanji '食' is 'kui', so there might be
a slight possibility which DevTeam had misred '軍用食' as
'gun-yo-kui', though I have no evidence.

As a native Japanese speaker, I feel it is most convincing that
DevTeam had referred from 'gan-yaku 丸薬', as most Japanese
NetHack players guess. Otherwise DevTeam might have mistaken
something, but I have no idea.

--
youkan

[JRBrown]

On Monday, October 29, 2012 9:16:09 AM UTC-4, Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:
> I've been able to trace back the Japanese for most of NetHack's
> samurai-specific words.
>

> 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.
>

As a wild guess, it might be a case of misreading "tantou" (短) as two characters rather than one; a tantou is the small knife carried with a tachi (forerunner of the katana - see link below), and "矢 + 豆", if taken separately, could be pronounced "shi + tou". It would be a nonsense "word", but I think we can take it that the person(s) coming up with these terms wasn't fluent in Japanese. :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tant%C5%8D

[Rast]

you...@cds.ne.jp wrote on Wed, 31 Oct 2012 21:42:53 -0700 (PDT):
>
> As other people suggested, no Japanese NetHack players can figure out
> what "gunyoki" is.

> "Osaku" would be "saku ?", a ninja tool for lockpicking.

> "Tanko ??" is literally "short-armor".

> "Shito" is also an unknown word for Japanese,

So, uh, is anyone going to forward this thread to the dev team? They
won't fix anything, but they might add it to the bugs list.


--
There walked into the lethal quicksands a very old man in tattered
purple, crowned with withered vine-leaves and gazing ahead as if upon the
golden domes of a fair city where dreams are understood. That night
something of youth and beauty died in the elder world. - H P Lovecraft

[sam...@verizon.net]

I'm a bit late to this, I know, but... Is it possible gunyoki is a misspelling (or miss-romanization) of gunyaki (軍焼き)? I know that's not a real word, but it's the sort of thing someone who knows Japanese mostly from samurai films and restaurants (like me :P ) might come up with.

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

On Sunday, November 4, 2012 11:01:06 PM UTC-5, you...@cds.ne.jp wrote:

> As a native Japanese speaker, I feel it is most convincing that
> DevTeam had referred from 'gan-yaku 丸薬',

Problem is, the Dev Team were, rather obviously, not native
Japanese speakers. They were clearly much more fluent in
English than in Japanese.

Nobody fluent in English (or any other major European
language for that matter) would ever transliterate 丸薬
as "gunyoki". All three vowels are very wrong -- not
just different, but from opposite sides of the vowel
continuum (a/e/i versus o/u) in every single case.

Getting A and U mixed up, for example, is a distinctively
east-Asian trait, almost as much as mixing up R with L.

(An Engish speaker is far more likely to confuse な with
が or つ with す or the entire ら row with the だ row or
even お with う. If working with strictly written
material, an English speaker might also confuse あ with
え, because those sounds are written with the same letter
in English, though we would never confuse those two
sounds if speaking aloud or listening to spoken words.)

No, I don't buy that the original DevTeam, working in
English primarily because that was their native language,
changed お to u, a second お to o separated from the next
vowel by just one consonant, and う to i, all in the
same world. No way.

If a native English speaker made *one* such mistake, we
could speculate that maybe it was a finger-on-the-wrong-key
typo that didn't get noticed, and by the time they looked
at their transliteration again they'd forgotten the Japanese
word they looked up. That's a reach, but with one such
change it might be possible. Three such mistakes in the
same word, however, is completely implausible.

Sloppy transliteration of ganyaku could easily lead to
ganyakkoo, gonnyaku, gonnyokku, ganyakkew, or maybe even
gone-yokk-oo. But it could not lead to gunyoki, not if
it was done by a Westerner -- which NetHack was.

My best guess at this point is, they were using a paper
dictionary, and they tried to look up the kanji one at a
time, and they either got a similar-looking kanji with a
subtly different radical (Japanese has several different
pairs of radicals that look basically the same to the
Western eye but mean something completely different; we
don't have this problem with modern Internet dictionaries,
because we copy and paste; but with a paper dictionary
it would be an issue) or else they just picked the wrong
reading, which would also be easy to do.

It's also vaguely possible that they couldn't find what
they wanted in a dictionary and just made up fake words
that sounded Japanese enough to be convincing for
Westerners. It wouldn't be the first time.

[Brother Tshober]

Tell a Japanese speaker gunyoki and see what they say.
--
JFW
PHD
ECE
Electrical and Computer Engineering