Le 11-07-08 08:37, Pat Flannery a écrit :
On 7/8/2011 4:30 AM, Pat Flannery wrote:
I say we send the Nostromo to Titan. :-)
In the movie, it actually looked like they had landed there, cloudy
atmosphere, cold, and ringed planet in the sky.
I'd still would like to know how they could get that whole giant
refinery complex up to over the speed of light.
Starfleet didn't have a finger on that type of technology, even if
maximum warp speed for the whole works was pretty low.
I didn't know where "Sulaco" came from BTW, assuming that both it and
Nostromo were either Chinese or Japanese owned spacecraft, based on the
sound of their names:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostromo
I don't know about Mandarin or any other Chinese dialect, but Sulaco
and Nostromo aren't Japanese.
Nostromo isn't just not a Japanese word like it isn't an English word.
To a Japanese Nostromo is an unpronounceable string of letters, like
wrzktouiis would be to someone English. As you probably know the
Japanese use ideograms to write, those ideograms are called kanji and
are originally from China. But because the Chinese writing system isn't
suitable to write Japanese, they need other symbols, kana. The kanji, do
not indicate pronunciation, they indicate a meaning. For instance *
means inside, in Japanese it is pronounced naka. A guy from China will
recognise the symbol * and know what it means, but probably won't know
that it is pronounced naka in Japanese. On the other hand, the kana are
somewhat like letters, they don't indicate a meaning, they indicate a
sound. So, even though this isn't the proper way to write inside in
Japanese, if you write なか someone from Japan will be able to read
this, the first symbol reads na and the second reads ka. If you would
want to write Nostromo using kana, you can't do it, there are no kana
for that because the sounds are not pronounceable. Except for the n and
a few special cases, they don't pronounce consonants without a vowel.
That is why I used only two kana to write naka. They don't write n then
a, they have a symbol for na, and another symbol for ka, but no symbol
for k. A k without a vowel after is unpronounceable. Beer was brought to
Japan by people speaking english, so beer is called ビル, pronounced
something like birou, they added the ou at the end because r without a
vowel is unpronounceable (in fact r isn't pronounceable at all even with
a vowel after, but they have syllables with a sound somewhere between a
r and an l, I can't pronounce that sound. But if you pronounce it as
rou, they think you have a funny accent but they understand, if you
pronounce it as lou they also think you have a funny accent and also
understand, how this can be, since for us l and r are quite different, I
don't know but that is the way it is.)
Sulaco is not a Japanese word, it would be pronounceable, but the proper
way to write the k sound in romanji (writting with our letters) is with
the letter k. So if it was a Japanese name it would be written Sulako.
Alain Fournier