Ugetsu

OK, I have been seeing some Japanese in a TV ad and last night -- I have the ability to rewind and pause on my cable TV, so I did that and copied down the line. It is an American Airlines ad, and there is a truck very visible for a while, and painted on the side is

エンドウ硝子エ業



The first characters are easy if you know kana -- everyone learning Japanese learns kana first. These are katakana that say "Endou-"

Now the rest of the analysis would occur to someone who knows Japanese in about five seconds. For me it took about a half hour with dictionaries.

In the next character I recognized stone -- seki or ishi 石 -- but I didn't know what the character meant. Evidently it means "glass" and Google Translate gives "garasu" or glass for 硝, which comes out as something like "bright stone."

"Ko" is an easy kanji that one sees all the time, 子, implies a child or baby. Kodomo is "really" spelled starting with "ko."

The "E" character is a little gratuitous here, like a dash. エ

The last character was oddly familiar because of the pronoun "boku" which is man plus that character -- 僕. Without the "man" radical it means "company" and is pronounced "gyou." 業 so that the last word on the truck is "ko-gyou" and the whole caption is "Endo garasu ko-gyou"

Endou glass company.

And then what is cool is that I used the Japanese as a search term and came up with a website that discusses the ad. What I had not realized is that in the glass carried by the glass truck, is the reflection of a tiny distant airplane, evidently from American Airlines. The author (in Japanese) admires this and wishes he could have been the director.

2011?05?20??????Atelier Plum Creek ??????????

Paste the URL into Google Translate to see the discussion.

Or see below

エンドウ硝子工業のトラックの荷台にのっている硝子に映っている
小さな小さな飛行機。ニクい演出ですよね。

日本の企業CMって、こういう映像とコピーだけの
シンプルでオサレなCMが少ない気がするな・・・。

At any rate I feel like I understand the whole ad a lot better, and I now know what the heck that truck is doing in the middle of it!

pitahaya

工 is not "e" or a dash, it is a kanji that means "work," here pronounced kou as part of 工業. Notice that エ and 工 are different in the length of the two horizontal strokes. The kou doesn't come from the 子 in 硝子; although 子 is often pronounced ko, here it's part of the kanji compound "garasu."

Ugetsu

Ah, thanks @Pitahaya. I did think it was unusual that one kanji would have three syllables. Google translate now gives the pronunciation so that was how I got "garasu." Never occurred to me that "ko" was "su", and it seems a little unfair to have kanji that look almost identical to kana!! Still it was cool to learn that there is an airplane reflected in the "garasu." I doubt I would ever have noticed that in the TV ad.

Ugetsu

OK, now I am thinking -- what other kanji can be confused with kana??

The one that has sent me looking at kana tables (in vain) is the Japanese ditto sign. 々

It looks a little like katakana "ma" or "mu" -- マ　ム

You can find it on every other page of KnJ because it is how Mimi's name is spelled, mei-ditto.

Are there others? I think there are, but memory is fuzzy.

Mayotta

カ(ka) and 力 (chikara)
タ (ta) and 夕 (the "yuu" in "yuuhi")
ロ (ro) and 口 (kuchi)
チ (chi) and 千 (sen)
ニ (ni) and 二 (ni)
ト (to) and 卜 (ura/boku [fortune-telling])
セ (se) and 七 (nana/shichi)
ー (elongation character [chouonpu]) and 一 (ichi)

Ugetsu

Thanks @Mayotta!!

I really hadn't realized there were so many.

Searching my memory, I think there was one that looks kind of like a "7" that isn't on your list. I can dig around and see if I can find the page I am remembering. But it's a fuzzy memory and it may indeed be on the list.

Treacherous stuff!! When I was starting to learn the kana a friend who knows Japanese told me that even those were tricky -- do the dots slope to the left or right, very tiny differences lead to big mistakes sometimes.

パソコン　　パンコン　　パノコン　　パツコシ

Only the first one is right, "pasokon." PC, Personal Computer. I remember reading it as "pankon" and going crazy trying to figure out what that meant (second word). The third word with the missing dot is "panokon" and the fourth word shows the difference between tsu and shi, with the double dots slanting differently.

Mayotta

Well, there's ゝ, the hiragana repetition mark. Is that it?

pitahaya

子 is pronounced こ in Japanese names or other native Japanese-derived words that use kun'yomi pronunciations. But 子 can be pronounced in several different ways depending on context. す is one of its on'yomi pronunciations, and it sounds like the pronunciation in modern Mandarin or Cantonese, zi. In Chinese 子 is often tacked on the ends of words to turn them into nouns.

But this doesn't mean 硝子 should be literally parsed as 硝 gara 子 su, since it does come from the Germanic loanword "glass" after all. 硝子 is one word unit "garasu," a kanji compound taken for convenience to represent the sound of this foreign word, and is usually written ガラス to follow the rule of other loanwords. 硝 is normally pronounced しょう in other kanji compounds where it means nitrate.

The forms of kana were originally derived from simplified forms of kanji in calligraphy, so in stylized handwriting you could come across the problem of certain kana and kanji looking alike. Context always comes to the rescue, though.

Ugetsu

@Pitahaya, great stuff, glad we lured you out of "lurk mode." Hope you hang around and play with us.

@Mayotta -- maybe. It was in a specific doujin that I got Sayo to translate -- after the manga there was a page long "author rant" and I was a little disappointed that Sayo hadn't done that as well. Of course lots of words and no pictures, so I understand the reasoning. But that was one of the first things I tried to do by myself and I tripped over a few things. So I know where to look for it when I get the chance.

Mayotta

Do you remember offhand what the context was? If the character made you think it was katakana, hiragana, or kanji (or perhaps some non-kanji/non-kana Japanese character) in particular?

Then again, it could very well be a plain old non-Japanese 7. For example, when I read chapter 75 for the first time, I was wondering what that wiggly character with a hook on it at the bottom of the second-to-last page was. It was only after I saw the translation ("Are you a sadist!?") that I realized that it was an S. An S with what looks like a single serif.

...And I just thought of 了.