General Japanese Culture Thread

No it is not.

maybe your looking for Honoka​? while its very..... not nomal for those specific kanji, you can use them to get that name.

edited 3rd Jun '17 1:25:03 PM by Imca

I mean on the other hand "North" isn't a normal English name but that never stopped Kanye West.

I personally have never seen a name that mixes Hiragana and Kanji in the same name, its a bit stranger then "North"

Now I am not going to say that it doesn't exist, since obviously I haven't seen how every single person writes there name, but in over 20 years of experience I have never seen it.

Names in Katakana yes, names in Hirigana yes, names in Kanji most common, but never one that mixes them.

edited 3rd Jun '17 1:42:41 PM by Imca

How does it mix up those two? Please, I'm very interested.

Hinokami is 火の神

火(fire) and 神(kami/spirit/god/whatever your preferd translation of kami is) are kanji that when used for a name would get you Honoka

の is hiragana used here as a particle similar to "of" it combines two nouns together when your forming a sentence.

edited 3rd Jun '17 1:56:30 PM by Imca

Ah. Sorry, my mistake. I don't even remember how I came up with the "no" part.

What would be the proper Japanese Kanji for "god of fire", by the way?

Hinokami is right for "god of fire"

Its just not quite right as a name.

In many cases you can kind of cheat the の by using just the kanji (for instance, I know a guy whose last name is 雨森 but read Amenomori) or by using 乃, as far as I'm aware.

That said, yeah, I'm not really sure how you'd get 火 or 炎 and 神 into a name that actually sounds like a name...

Hinokami is more of a surname. Although it would still be atypical. Either rare kanji or kanji reading, or the name is very old in origin. No-kami, was added to the name of an individual who gained noble rank from the emperor (IIRC). A modernised version of an old name.

It could also be a Han Chinese name that has been rephrased in Japanese. These commonly applied to ethnic Hans who were citizens or subjects of the Japanese Empire, especially in Taiwan where the majority of people were Hans.

One of my Taiwanese grandparents was born in 1941 and thus lived the first five years of his life as a Japanese person would prior to the Chinese Nationalists seizing the island in 1945. His given name "Snow Peak" (雪峰) is said as "Xue Feng" in Mandarin and "Yukimine" in Japanese, the latter which Japanese exchanged students have personally confirmed to me as being unheard of as a given name for a Japanese person.

edited 3rd Jun '17 10:36:27 PM by FluffyMcChicken

Except that doesnt work since Chinese doesn't have hiragana at all, and its the hiragana in the name that gives the issue.

That is interesting to hear though.

Fascinating. It's like when I found out the Major's 'name', Kusanagi Mokuto, was probably an alias because it sounded fake, like "Rowena Excalibur"

Motoko, not Mokuto.

Yeah, I feel like 火神 would be an odd name even in Chinese (though I have no idea how it would be read).

You could probably read it as Kashin, but I've never heard of anyone named that and it would probably be a male name anyway.

No, depending on what it is referred to. It is pronounced huo shen and it literally means fire God. In China, it is a deity of fire worshipped over there.

I feel like I blundered into a linguistics convention. If someone could post a link to a primer on Japanese naming conventions, I would appreciate it.

Generally, you can assume that most family names have four syllables/phonemes; there are some exceptions for three (Kamiya, etc.) or five (I work with a woman whose family name is Kamenosono), but I think generally four-syllable names are the most common. In my experience, at least.

Since we're discussing Japanese names, are either of the following plausible feminine counterparts for the given name "Shinji" (真嗣 / 真次)?

• Shinko (真子)
• Shinju (真珠).

Some sites claim that they are, but no matter how much I search, Google seems unable to turn up any results that reliably support such claims.

Seems plausible, if a bit odd sounding. Shinju means pearl, but Shinko sounds strange. It's also a name, which are hardly subject to grammar or many strict rules.

edited 4th Jun '17 10:19:06 PM by TerminusEst

You could also read 真子 as Mako, probably. Shinju is no name I've ever heard of, but you could potentially read it as Mashu if you wanted to.

Which is Mathew btw. >.>

Yeah, it could be read as Mako, Makotoko, and some other readings, but I'm trying to have the new name not stray too far from "Shinji", just to keep the Gender Flip recognizable. If I were going for a Sweet Polly Oliver-style scenario, I wouldn't have cared about maintaing similarities.

Yeah, Mashuu is how the name "Matthew" would be rendered in Japanese phonetics. Yet even Type-Moon seems insistent that the character's given name ought to be romanized as "Mash" rather than anything that could be a remotely realistic derivation of "Matthew".

Errrr, no I play that game.

Chaldea Standard Craft Essance◊

... Is that the only example of that spelling?

AFIAK thats the only craft essence with a name on it at all.