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A little help - Japanese name for Dental Floss
- Thread starter Mr. Anderson
- Start date
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katie ta achoo said:
That's actually quite funny - so would those Japanese characters below The Simpons be the Japanese for 'Dental Floss'?
Thanks so much
D
Hmm the first two characters are kanji and probably tigers attempt to use 'f' 'loss'... (just a guess I only know a few Kanji)Applespider said:
The other characters are used to sound out non-japanese words so what that is is like typing 'de' 'n' 'ta' 'l' 'fo' 'ro' tsu' or something similar.. for some reason I can't see the pic while composing the message making this rather hard for a guy that has maybe a 'first grade understanding' of the language.
Applespider said:
Okay....I'll chime in here with my very limited and embarassing knowledge of Japanese.
If you look at the second set of characters that Applespider uses (they are what is called katakana - the phonetic characters that are used in Japanese for foreign words) and you compare it to the Graphic that Katie supplied... look under the words "The Simpsons" on the package.....
SEE.....they are the same characters
De un ta ru fu ra su
Dental floss....
Which reminds me....I gotta do that....
Doctor Q said:
Well, as i read it again using the OS X Kana palette, we're both a bit off (not that it should suprise anybody)
De un ta ru fu ro su
("un" and "so" kana characters are very similar. I messed up on the "RO" thinking it was "RA"....kind of my Japanese form of "Engrish"...where I think I know what the kana should be for a non english word than what it is in practice)
I changed my version above to dentaruhurosu after studying a bit more and seeing that the consonant form of n looks much like "so". Then I saw the posts after mine and see that I missed "fu" as well.
But none of my katakana charts have "fu" at all. Can you explain why? This won't help Mr. Anderson but I'm awfully curious.
But none of my katakana charts have "fu" at all. Can you explain why? This won't help Mr. Anderson but I'm awfully curious.
Doctor Q said:
As far as I know, there is no F in any Asian language. (Coffee, e.g., is Kopi as far as Koreans and Pilipinos are concerned, Kohi for Japanese.) However, if you use the Hepburn transliteration instead of the government's very consistent and flawed transliteration, you will see the actual sounds used.
Code:
a i u e o
ka ki ku ke ko
sa shi su se so
ta chi tsu te to
na ni nu ne no
ha hi fu he ho
ma mi mu me mo
ya (i) yu (e) yo
ra ri ru re ro
wa (i) (u) (e) (o)
nThere used to be characters for each of those placeholders in parentheses but those had been eliminated somewhere after WWII with the simplification of Japanese pushed by the American government.
Sorry, Mr A., that I didn't have an answer for you. I'm glad there are always resourceful members here in the forums.
Ok, first off - thanks to katie ta achoo for the Simpson's Floss - I ended up going with that. And special thanks to Dr. Q. for his wonderfully messed up Japanese signage which inspired me even further.
I needed the Japanese dental floss for my entry in a Food Art Party in which the theme was Dental Floss. So I combined the two and came up with the first image below as the sign, adjusting some of the words where needed to make it more "flossy".
A spinach salad that I love to get when I have sushi is called Ohitashi - where the name came from, but I couldn't find that and ended up using seaweed salad - but it worked well. The second image is a pic of my entry in the contest tonight at the party. Its a mouth made out of endive for the teeth and maki sushi for the lips on a bed of seaweed salad and some in the teeth (so you need to floss) I won for best looking and most creative!
Thanks again to helping out.
D
I needed the Japanese dental floss for my entry in a Food Art Party in which the theme was Dental Floss. So I combined the two and came up with the first image below as the sign, adjusting some of the words where needed to make it more "flossy".
A spinach salad that I love to get when I have sushi is called Ohitashi - where the name came from, but I couldn't find that and ended up using seaweed salad - but it worked well. The second image is a pic of my entry in the contest tonight at the party. Its a mouth made out of endive for the teeth and maki sushi for the lips on a bed of seaweed salad and some in the teeth (so you need to floss) I won for best looking and most creative!
Thanks again to helping out.
D
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darkwing said:
To me, the sounds in that series, when Japanese speakers make them, don't sound exactly either like an "h" or an "f" as used in American English. But if you listen to Japanese speakers speaking in English, they tend to interchange this sound for f's in English words sometimes. And Americans tend to do something like you said. Maybe I'm wrong, though, and there is a difference, even when Japanese are speaking Japanese to each other, in the way the consonant of the "fu" sounds than the consonant in the "he".... I'm not sure.
But anyway, it's all irrelevant. One way or another, that's the way you transliterate "dental floss" into Japanese.
You is one crazy dude! And verrrrrrrrrrry creative too! Congratulations.Mr. Anderson said:I won for best looking and most creative!
I had to look at that pic for about 10 minutes to realize it was a set of teeth.
Oy! I cannot see well tonight!
and rock on! Looks awesome!
Oy! I cannot see well tonight!
and rock on! Looks awesome!
