Post by y***@cds.ne.jp

As a native Japanese speaker, I feel it is most convincing that

DevTeam had referred from 'gan-yaku 丸薬',

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

Problem is, the Dev Team were, rather obviously, not nativeJapanese speakers. They were clearly much more fluent inEnglish than in Japanese.Nobody fluent in English (or any other major Europeanlanguage for that matter) would ever transliterate 丸薬as "gunyoki". All three vowels are very wrong -- notjust different, but from opposite sides of the vowelcontinuum (a/e/i versus o/u) in every single case.Getting A and U mixed up, for example, is a distinctivelyeast-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 oreven お with う. If working with strictly writtenmaterial, an English speaker might also confuse あ withえ, because those sounds are written with the same letterin English, though we would never confuse those twosounds if speaking aloud or listening to spoken words.)No, I don't buy that the original DevTeam, working inEnglish primarily because that was their native language,changed お to u, a second お to o separated from the nextvowel by just one consonant, and う to i, all in thesame world. No way.If a native English speaker made *one* such mistake, wecould speculate that maybe it was a finger-on-the-wrong-keytypo that didn't get noticed, and by the time they lookedat their transliteration again they'd forgotten the Japaneseword they looked up. That's a reach, but with one suchchange it might be possible. Three such mistakes in thesame word, however, is completely implausible.Sloppy transliteration of ganyaku could easily lead toganyakkoo, gonnyaku, gonnyokku, ganyakkew, or maybe evengone-yokk-oo. But it could not lead to gunyoki, not ifit was done by a Westerner -- which NetHack was.My best guess at this point is, they were using a paperdictionary, and they tried to look up the kanji one at atime, and they either got a similar-looking kanji with asubtly different radical (Japanese has several differentpairs of radicals that look basically the same to theWestern eye but mean something completely different; wedon't have this problem with modern Internet dictionaries,because we copy and paste; but with a paper dictionaryit would be an issue) or else they just picked the wrongreading, which would also be easy to do.It's also vaguely possible that they couldn't find whatthey wanted in a dictionary and just made up fake wordsthat sounded Japanese enough to be convincing forWesterners. It wouldn't be the first time.