Your mind IS in the gutter, but that’s why you belong here fellow Mehtizen.
To be fair, it probably pronounced something like “aljzoitklaoiska” or very similar.
@chienfou yes I remember once reading an article full of them: like “Vicks” in German which in German is pronounced almost identically to Ficks (German for, well you can guess, change then “I”)
The car the “Nova” (“won’t go” in Spanish). If I recall correctly the original Chinese characters for Coca Cola was something like “Bite the wax tadpole”… There were more examples, that’s just what I remember.
I also recall that when Kodak named their company, they spent a lot of time and effort researching the word to make sure it didn’t mean anything in any language.
@chienfou@OnionSoup The one about the Nova is apocryphal, that was made up by people here in the US. I have confirmed this with multiple sources in Central America. The Nova was highly regarded.
@chienfou@OnionSoup Chinese is a funny thing. Unlike Korean, Japanese, Hebrew, Farsi, and Hindi, national Chinese disregards a phonetic alphabet; it doesn’t use “letters” and is one of the few modern written languages to still be entirely “glyph” based.
That is to say, there’s no such thing as a borrowed word or phrase (like RSVP or mea culpa or boondocks or hamburger, all words taken directly from other languages) - all new words have to be made up from existing words. Some things will be directly related (Apple the brand uses the same indigenous word as apple the fruit; other languages will pronounce Apple as “Ah-puh-l”), some will be approximations (telephone is made up of the words “electric” and “speech”), and others will be phonetic… But based on whole words.
It’s the equivalent of… Well in fighting game Street Fighter Alpha, a character is pronouncing Japanese using English. The Japanese phrase “are you okay” is pronounced (and romanized into English as) “dai jobu deska”, but the character will spout “DIE JOB YOU DEATH CAR”. That is very close to the pronunciation, but it looks ridiculous.
Spelling the brand Coca Cola (4 syllables), it isn’t really made up of the 4 words “bite the wax tadpole”, but the phonetics are similar. It’s actually made up of the words canned mouth canned happiness; if you combine canned and mouth, you get delicious (ko kuh); but if combine mouth and canned you get mouthful (kuh ko). It depends on where you put the space between words.
It’s like the Oxford comma joke. When you invited strippers, JFK and Stalin; did you mean two men and strippers, or two strippers named JFK and Stalin?
@chienfou@OnionSoup Fortunately for General Motors, they never tried to market that vehicle or the majority of the other ones like it in France. It would not have worked well.
No comment
I mean, why would a company do that? Don’t they proof-check anything?
@OnionSoup They didn’t want to be anal about it.
@OnionSoup it’s worse when you fit in the subtitle
@OnionSoup @pakopako ok, I sent it to her! I guess we’ll see.
I’m going to use the refashioned hippies line, " Just show one 14 year old boy…"
@ChompyGator You beat me to it. I wonder if she has done this one yet…
@ChompyGator
She would love this. You should send it to her.
I would but I have NO idea how.
@ChompyGator @tommg12 I sent her a link to this post.
Maybe the company was taken over by assholes.
@yakkoTDI
This just reminded me of my knockoff ‘NAN’ ‘720B’ Dreamliner toy plane.
They probably sell crampons
/showme someone getting kicked in the ass by a crampon
@mediocrebot now that’s not an ass. It’s ass backwards.
/showme someone getting kicked in the ssa by a crampon
This AI stuff reminds me of the old Nokia phone boxes.
There’s one series that just has a bunch of businessmen with awkward smiles trying to shake hands. Emphasis on “try”.
And there’s this. What does this have to do with cell phones?
@mediocrebot
It looks like she has crampons, but his look like ice skates…
@pakopako Is this Nokia’s early experiments with AI?
If “anal” really is the “inspiration of Japan”, it explains the falling birth rates
Your mind IS in the gutter, but that’s why you belong here fellow Mehtizen.
To be fair, it probably pronounced something like “aljzoitklaoiska” or very similar.
@tohar1 “Zen Nippon Kūyu Kabushiki gaisha,” to be accurate .
Lol.
now i cant unsee
There are a ton of examples of bad translations/imagery in foreign business names.
@chienfou yes I remember once reading an article full of them: like “Vicks” in German which in German is pronounced almost identically to Ficks (German for, well you can guess, change then “I”)
The car the “Nova” (“won’t go” in Spanish). If I recall correctly the original Chinese characters for Coca Cola was something like “Bite the wax tadpole”… There were more examples, that’s just what I remember.
I also recall that when Kodak named their company, they spent a lot of time and effort researching the word to make sure it didn’t mean anything in any language.
@chienfou @OnionSoup The one about the Nova is apocryphal, that was made up by people here in the US. I have confirmed this with multiple sources in Central America. The Nova was highly regarded.
@OnionSoup @werehatrack
Non vas in French means no go… When pronounced it sounds like No-va.
@chienfou @OnionSoup Chinese is a funny thing. Unlike Korean, Japanese, Hebrew, Farsi, and Hindi, national Chinese disregards a phonetic alphabet; it doesn’t use “letters” and is one of the few modern written languages to still be entirely “glyph” based.
That is to say, there’s no such thing as a borrowed word or phrase (like RSVP or mea culpa or boondocks or hamburger, all words taken directly from other languages) - all new words have to be made up from existing words. Some things will be directly related (Apple the brand uses the same indigenous word as apple the fruit; other languages will pronounce Apple as “Ah-puh-l”), some will be approximations (telephone is made up of the words “electric” and “speech”), and others will be phonetic… But based on whole words.
It’s the equivalent of… Well in fighting game Street Fighter Alpha, a character is pronouncing Japanese using English. The Japanese phrase “are you okay” is pronounced (and romanized into English as) “dai jobu deska”, but the character will spout “DIE JOB YOU DEATH CAR”. That is very close to the pronunciation, but it looks ridiculous.
Spelling the brand Coca Cola (4 syllables), it isn’t really made up of the 4 words “bite the wax tadpole”, but the phonetics are similar. It’s actually made up of the words canned mouth canned happiness; if you combine canned and mouth, you get delicious (ko kuh); but if combine mouth and canned you get mouthful (kuh ko). It depends on where you put the space between words.
It’s like the Oxford comma joke. When you invited strippers, JFK and Stalin; did you mean two men and strippers, or two strippers named JFK and Stalin?
@chienfou @OnionSoup Fortunately for General Motors, they never tried to market that vehicle or the majority of the other ones like it in France. It would not have worked well.