From: Dido Sevilla <dido.sevilla@...>
Date: 2006-08-31T22:10:21+09:00
Subject: Re: How to spy on the Japanese Rubists

On 8/30/06, William Crawford <wccrawford@gmail.com> wrote:
> Their language is based more upon sounds than most.  Each character
> represents a sound, and then sounds together create a word.  Our letters
> do have sounds, but the complete sound is only made with a combination
> of letters.  'rubima' (Ruby Magazine) can only be written 1 way in their
> language, and apparently also means 'motivation bean jam'.  Any time
> they shorten something like that, it's almost assured to also mean
> something else.  The translator has no way of knowing this was a short
> form of other words, and does its best to translate.

Frankly, I think this is absurd. I'm studying Japanese myself, and
from an online dictionary (http://kanjidict.stc.cx) their word for
'motivation' is 'shigeki' or 'mochibeshon' (imported from English and
mangled in the way the Japanese tend to mangle borrowed foreign
words), and as Mr. DeNatale has mentioned, 'anko' means red bean jam.
Apparently the only common words that begin with 'ru-bi' are their
imported word Ruby itself, and the chemical element Rubidium (ルビジウム,
ru-bi-ji-u-mu). There are also apparently no common Kanji that has the
reading ru-bi or bi-ma, and of the 26 or so kanji that have the
reading (either on-yomi or kun-yomi) 'ru' none of them have a meaning
even remotely close to any of 'motivation' or 'bean' or 'jam'
(however, interestingly enough, there are apparently several kanji
with the reading 'ru' that mean 'precious stone' or 'lapis lazuli').
Someone's translation software is really screwed up if it rendered
ru-bi-ma as motivation bean paste, however it was written.