naming, words, romanization and other things

[forgotten_aria]

So in WoW I have a character named Ressha (this is not a post about WoW, it's a post about language.) I chose this name because it's the romanization of the japanese for train. Today I was informed that resha in hebrew (note the single s) means wickedness. Since the double s does not change the pronounciation to english speakers and because they are both romanizations, they are about the same word.

Should I be worried? I'm going to assume not, since I've not been named-policed yet. It would be nice for someone who actually speaks Hebrew to give me an opinion, because there is a wide spectrum of "wickedness" all the way from putting practical jokes to trying to destroy the world and I know that translations of words always miss the subtlies and cultural associations.

Mostly I think that if you take the span of human language, including slang, there is likely no safe word to name your character that doesn't mean something bad to someone. Ressha's just annoyed because she's kind of sweet. She wants to be a tank because she's noble enough to step up and make sure other people don't get hurt. She doesn't have a wicked bone in her body.

Comments

[gorgo.livejournal.com]

Unless it's an actual obscenity, I wouldn't worry about it. Like you said, the space of character strings that sound word-like but aren't words in any language is fairly small, and something that just translates as "wickedness" doesn't strike me as a big deal.

Reminds me of a lecture in 9.00, though. The point of the lecture was that part of having learned a language was learning what sequences of phonemes matched the language. As an illustration, the instructor read us a list of non-words (at least in English), and it was pretty clear that some of them sounded like words and some were just strings of sounds. The amusing part was that he prefaced the exercise with a speech about how every few years, it turns out that one of his non-words is actually something nasty in someone's native language, and if that happens, we should assume it was an accident, tell him after class, and he'd take it off the list.

[ladyada.livejournal.com]

im not that fluent anymore, but i recall the word for wicked is pronounced more like "rasha"

Bite the wax tadpole

[kvarko.livejournal.com]

I can't help you, but it does remind me of two things:

The intro to an old "You can't do that on television" episode went like this: "The football game between MIT and UCLA will not be broadcast today because 'Mitucla' is a dirty word in Arundi-Barundi. Instead, we bring you ..."

And the words that Arthur Dent speaks, which are carried by a wormhole to two warring factions in a far away world, where it means the most horrible thing you can possibly say in their language. :)

[kvarko.livejournal.com]

Actually, it reminds me of one other thing: I laughed my head off when I saw, in a toy store, FIKI Football (http://www.fikisports.com/). I guess it stands for Flick-It-Kick-It, and it's basically paper-football like you'd play in elementary school, but they've made it out of pleather and plastic and sell it. Anyway... "fiki" means "to fuck" in Esperanto. ... laughed my head off (and bought one).

[seborn.livejournal.com]

Short form: No, you should not be worried. pffft.

It's not a familiar word to me, but it does exist. Rasha is more common, a wicked person, like the wicked son at Passover, someone who views themselves as outside the law and community. Which sounds like the anti-Ressha, really.

That said, any string is going to mean something in at least one and probably multiple languages. If someone names their character Chai, maybe they named them Life in Hebrew, or maybe they like drinking spicy tea. If they named them Mal, maybe it's a Firefly reference, or maybe they named them Evil in French.

For that matter, if we're worried about the way foreign words sound to English speakers, your username is pretty weird here. forgotten_(extent of surface within closed borders)? I guess it makes sense, but that's not what you meant at all.