<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>So a little while ago, Gabe from Penny Arcade was fiddling around with his new drawing style and coming up with the new character Cardboard Tube Samurai at the same time, as shown in this strip:
<a href="http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?d ... 5">January 15th PA</a>
Having studied a little bit of Japanese in college due to my being a dorky anime fan, I noticed that the katakana used wasn't quite right, and wrote Gabe this email:
<i>Hey Gabe,
I'm sure a couple thousand people have told you this already, but when writing
the English "vowel+r" sound in katakana, you usually have to extend the vowel
sound on the previous symbol for it to sound right when you read it.
In other words, you wrote "cardboard tube" in today's strip as "kadobodo
tuubu". If you read that out loud with the correct prononciation, it's just
not going to sound right. I would have written "kaadoboodo tuubu" - putting
the dash character after both the ka and the bo - which when read out loud
sounds a lot more like the word "cardboard" than what you've written in the
strip.
I'm going to put the nitpicky Japanese student in me away now. Carry on.</i>
Gabe didn't write back (neither Gabe nor Tycho has ever responded to any emails I've sent them,) and I figured the subject was completely ignored. Imagine my delight, then, when I saw <a href="http://www.penny-arcade.com/ctsposter.gif">this image</a> in the comments of Monday's newspost, wherein Gabe made the exact changes that I recommended.
Am I the only one who made that suggestion? I doubt it, but I still get to think it's pretty cool.
<i>-57</i></div>
<a href="http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?d ... 5">January 15th PA</a>
Having studied a little bit of Japanese in college due to my being a dorky anime fan, I noticed that the katakana used wasn't quite right, and wrote Gabe this email:
<i>Hey Gabe,
I'm sure a couple thousand people have told you this already, but when writing
the English "vowel+r" sound in katakana, you usually have to extend the vowel
sound on the previous symbol for it to sound right when you read it.
In other words, you wrote "cardboard tube" in today's strip as "kadobodo
tuubu". If you read that out loud with the correct prononciation, it's just
not going to sound right. I would have written "kaadoboodo tuubu" - putting
the dash character after both the ka and the bo - which when read out loud
sounds a lot more like the word "cardboard" than what you've written in the
strip.
I'm going to put the nitpicky Japanese student in me away now. Carry on.</i>
Gabe didn't write back (neither Gabe nor Tycho has ever responded to any emails I've sent them,) and I figured the subject was completely ignored. Imagine my delight, then, when I saw <a href="http://www.penny-arcade.com/ctsposter.gif">this image</a> in the comments of Monday's newspost, wherein Gabe made the exact changes that I recommended.
Am I the only one who made that suggestion? I doubt it, but I still get to think it's pretty cool.
<i>-57</i></div>
[url=http://profile.mygamercard.net/Twxabfn][img]http://card.mygamercard.net/gbar/360/Twxabfn.gif[/img][/url]
