Donmai

Change Mokou to Moko (Fujiwara no)

Posted under General

Think this may be something there should be a poll on. Personally, I think it should be spelled "Moko" as I believe the "Mokou" spelling invites incorrect pronunciation understanding. For a while I believed that "Mokou" was pronounced "Mohkoo" because of the extra U. On the other hand, the "Moko" spelling would never cause misunderstandings for native English speakers. The only problem I foresee is that it goes against current convention, but you gotta be the change you desire, I guess.

I'm also for changing "Hinanawi" back to "Hinanai" and "Tewi" to "Tei" or "Te-i," for the record.

No. I don't have the time right now, but i will go in-depth with this later.

EDIT: It goes deeper than this, but to put it shortly, your suggestion would be akin to changing every instance of the name "Marie" to "Marì" or "Maree", because the e is not pronounced.

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feline_lump said:

Well, the short answer is that Danbooru officially defers to the modified Hepburn system used by the Japanese government (see topic #17011 for the most recent status). Concerns about the usability of this system are best brought up with linguists, not with us.

for う after an "o" vowel (standard long "o", as in あずまんがだいおう / "Azumanga Daioh"): Previously we always encoded this as "ou", we can now optionally render it as "ou", "oh", or "o"

Username_Hidden said:

No. I don't have the time right now, but i will go in-depth with this later.

EDIT: It goes deeper than this, but to put it shortly, your suggestion would be akin to changing every instance of the name "Marie" to "Marì" or "Maree", because the e is not pronounced.

It's not the same because it's spellings changing across systems of writing. Not sure if ZUN has ever actually written the name in romaji himself.

Edit: Meant to combine my 2 replies but messed up

Pronunciation concerns is not what I would consider a relevant point for renaming a character who the entire internet has called "Mokou" for over a decade. Danbooru is not really in the business of telling people how characters' names should be spelled, nor should it be. We didn't finally start using "Tohsaka" just to turn around and start using "Moko".

Pronunciation is always going to be an issue between languages, and it's something easily resolved by just learning the correct pronunciation. Anyone with a basic understanding of Japanese phonetics knows how to pronounce "Mokou" and anyone who doesn't can learn.

blindVigil said:

Pronunciation concerns is not what I would consider a relevant point for renaming a character who the entire internet has called "Mokou" for over a decade. Danbooru is not really in the business of telling people how characters' names should be spelled, nor should it be. We didn't finally start using "Tohsaka" just to turn around and start using "Moko".

Pronunciation is always going to be an issue between languages, and it's something easily resolved by just learning the correct pronunciation. Anyone with a basic understanding of Japanese phonetics knows how to pronounce "Mokou" and anyone who doesn't can learn.

Neither spelling are technically wrong unless ZUN himself has written the romaji somewhere. If he hasn't, Moko, Mokou, Mokoh, and Mokō are all technically correct and it's essentially preference on how it's written. You can also find doujins where her name is written as "Moko," though I think they tend to be older ones. I'd encourage the entire community to change to "Moko" if I had some way to.

Lobuttomize said:

Neither spelling are technically wrong unless ZUN himself has written the romaji somewhere. If he hasn't, Moko, Mokou, Mokoh, and Mokō are all technically correct and it's essentially preference on how it's written. You can also find doujins where her name is written as "Moko," though I think they tend to be older ones.

Her name is 妹紅. Since we follow Hepburn unless the artist explicitly provides a different name, the correct romanization for us is Mokou until/if ZUN decides to provide an official romanization (doubtful).

heartattack said:

That's hopefully because the characters are calling her もこ "Moko" as a nickname. A handy example is post #4534480 where she calls herself もこ and not 妹紅 or もこう

No, I know there's plenty of those, but I'm pretty sure I've seen the full name written as Moko before.

nonamethanks said:

Her name is 妹紅. Since we follow Hepburn unless the artist explicitly provides a different name, the correct romanization for us is Mokou until/if ZUN decides to provide an official romanization (doubtful).

As quoted above, for う after an "o" vowel (standard long "o", as in あずまんがだいおう / "Azumanga Daioh"): Previously we always encoded this as "ou", we can now optionally render it as "ou", "oh", or "o". Revised hepburn would use ō.

Regardless, people seem against it so I'll drop it.

nonamethanks said:

Her name is 妹紅. Since we follow Hepburn unless the artist explicitly provides a different name, the correct romanization for us is Mokou until/if ZUN decides to provide an official romanization (doubtful).

Would we realistically even bother? We still haven't done anything about Artoria, and it's no secret nobody wants to.

nonamethanks said:

until/if ZUN decides to provide an official romanization (doubtful).

He did. The name is written as Huziwara no Mokou in ULiL, PMiSS, and Imperishable Night. I doubt anyone wants to change Fujiwara, though.

[KN] said:

He did. The name is written as Huziwara no Mokou in ULiL, PMiSS, and Imperishable Night. I doubt anyone wants to change Fujiwara, though.

The Fujiwara vs Huziwara is just a difference of which romaji system is used (Hepburn vs Kunrei-shiki respectively.) Not sure if English has ever referred to the historical Fujiwara clan as Huziwara which would probably just cause confusion as she's supposed to be a part of the historical clan. Also, I think that's a post-translation thing but I'm not sure.

The short answer:
Danbooru doesn't make standards. Danbooru follows community standards.
If you think Mokou should be spelt as Moko, please bring it up with the Touhou Wiki and Touhou translation patch communities. If they change spellings, then Danbooru should too.
Changing names exclusively on Danbooru would cause confusion at best. It has already been done with Komano Aunn, whose name got changed to Aun in topic #14084 shortly after the release of HSiFS, and changed back to Aunn a couple years later (topic #17865) because Danbooru was the only website spelling her name like that (which i personally approve of, but again, consistency between the community).

The long answer:

Change Mokou to Moko_(Fujiwara_no)

This is just dumb. Why change the name order? I agree on changing names such as Yakumo Yukari to Yukari Yakumo, for ease of search, but names like Hata no Kokoro and the likes should be left alone. It's not a name order you can change.

[T]he "Moko" spelling would never cause misunderstandings for native English speakers.

You're assuming two things here:
-Danbooru is mostly used by english speakers
-English people don't know how to spell foreign names, and non-english people know how to spell english names
I understand your reasoning, but it will cause more harm than good. An example could be made for the proposed "Raysen" for [[Reisen_(touhou bougetsushou)|]. It fixed the problem for the english side, but would have caused non-english speakers to question the spelling.
There are a lot of other examples one could make about wrong name romanizations: Cirno (Chirno/Chillno), Flandre (Frandoll)...
And even then, what are you gonna do? Change every instance of ou/oh to o? This change would affect other copyrights too: Emiya Shirou should become Emiya Shiro, for example.

I'm also for changing "Hinanawi" back to "Hinanai" and "Tewi" to "Tei" or "Te-i," for the record.

The "wi" character is a now-unused japanese character. It basically means these characters come from long ago. Today it's pronounced like "i" but removing it would be removing part of the character's lore i feel. Plus it's not like mute letters are a new thing, they exist in all languages (just look at english!)

The Fujiwara vs Huziwara is just a difference of which romaji system is used (Hepburn vs Kunrei-shiki respectively.) Not sure if English has ever referred to the historical Fujiwara clan as Huziwara which would probably just cause confusion as she's supposed to be a part of the historical clan. Also, I think that's a post-translation thing but I'm not sure.

You dare question the Hakurei Kannushi?

On a more serious note: i'm a big ZUN fan, but it's no secret that his english is bad. Very bad.
The original, ZUN transliteration has been "Huziwara no Mokou". The old IN translation patch reflects that, but has later been changed to "Fujiwara" by fans.
Just to give another example: Shameimaru Aya has been spelt as both "Aya Shameimaru" and "Aya Syameimaru" in-game in her first appearance (PoFV). ZUN then proceeded to go forward with Syameimaru in MoF, only to finally change again to Shameimaru from SA onwards.

I could go on for a while, but in the end it doesn't really matter because Danbooru doesn't make the rules. If you want to try asking the other communities about it, hopefully they can give a better explaination than mine.

Username_Hidden said:
On a more serious note: i'm a big ZUN fan, but it's no secret that his english is bad. Very bad.
The original, ZUN transliteration has been "Huziwara no Mokou". The old IN translation patch reflects that, but has later been changed to "Fujiwara" by fans.
Just to give another example: Shameimaru Aya has been spelt as both "Aya Shameimaru" and "Aya Syameimaru" in-game in her first appearance (PoFV). ZUN then proceeded to go forward with Syameimaru in MoF, only to finally change again to Shameimaru from SA onwards.

I could go on for a while, but in the end it doesn't really matter because Danbooru doesn't make the rules. If you want to try asking the other communities about it, hopefully they can give a better explaination than mine.

Like I said, it's not about bad English, it's about which system of romaji is being used. しゃ is written as "Sya" in Kunrei-shiki romaji and "Sha" in Hebon-shiki (Hepburn) romaji

Lobuttomize said:

Like I said, it's not about bad English, it's about which system of romaji is being used. しゃ is written as "Sya" in Kunrei-shiki romaji and "Sha" in Hebon-shiki (Hepburn) romaji

Yeah, it was just an example on ZUN not being reliable.

Lobuttomize said:

Like I said, it's not about bad English, it's about which system of romaji is being used. しゃ is written as "Sya" in Kunrei-shiki romaji and "Sha" in Hebon-shiki (Hepburn) romaji

And ZUN isn't consistent in which one he uses, sometimes in the same game and sometimes even in the same damn name, hell "Huziwara no Mokou" itself is a mishmash of hepburn and kunrei, since it should be either "Fujiwara no Mokou" or "Huziwara no Mokô"

Well, it's like this: Danbooru, like most English fan communities of Japanese media, uses a waapuro ("word processor")-derived modified Hepburn romanization system for writing Japanese words in Latin characters. This system is used because:

1) Pronunciations are generally more intuitive for English speakers, compared to Kunrei-shiki.
2) It preserves the distinction between short and long vowels.
3) It avoids the use of macrons and circumflex accents that can be difficult to input on a standard (US) keyboard.
4) It is a more regular system (compared to some other Hepburn variants). Instead of trying to figure out whether to transcribe う as 'u' or 'o' or 'h' (depending on the preceding 'vowel'), all one needs to do is to transcribe the same kana directly into the same Latin letters. So う is always 'u".

For similar reasons, other fan communities (Touhou in particular) also tend to use the same or a similar romanization scheme.

Some exceptions are of course made for words that are often romanized in a different style. So, Tokyo instead of Toukyou and Kyoto instead of Kyouto. Likewise, for fictional characters or other words, we tend to also follow what their respective fandoms (or in-communities/subcultures) use, so as to maintain consistency in naming. So, we get Tohsaka instead of Toosaka, Tohno instead of Toono, Azumanga_Daioh instead of Daiou, Yu-Gi-Oh instead of Yu-Gi-Ou, and Shirow Masamune instead of Shirou. This helps us preserve consistency with the terms and names used in their respective fandoms, making it easier and more intuitive to search and tag them.

Now, our 'in-house' romanization scheme has been revised recently (as per topic #17011) to allow for more 'institutional flexibility' regarding this issue (i.e. gives us a justification to say "da rules allow this", instead of needing to go "let's make an(other) exception for this, because reasons"), but the default romanization scheme is still this waapuro-derived modified Hepburn. That is why most of the characters/copyrights with 魔王/まおう in their names have it translated as "maou" instead of "maoh" like what you would expect from Azumanga Daioh and Yu-Gi-Oh, despite having the same 王/おう ending.

Going back to fan-preferred romanizations... generally speaking, the author or copyright holders (or 'official' localization teams) has siginficant sway in this. If a copyright manages to 'establish' a specific way of writing a particular name (or term), then most fandoms will follow that convention, and Danbooru will follow likewise. This is also why we use localized names for Pokemon and Fire Emblem characters. Again, the same reason applies; it makes it easier for users to recognize those tags and search and tag them.

As another example, for Umamusume in particular we tend to use the official JRA spelling instead of our default romanization scheme because the characters are based on real-life horses with long established names that have already been spelled in a certain way in English for ages because of, well, the horse racing industry (and newspapers and other news sources documenting said industry).

And on a related note, to extend the analogy with a Chinese example instead of a Japanese one, Arknights characters and terms with Chinese names also use Wade-Giles preferred in the localization (Ch'en instead of Chen) instead of Pinyin romanization which we use as our default 'semi-official' scheme elsewhere. Reason being, of course, that the Wade-Giles romanizations have become firmly established among the English fandom.

Sometimes there's a pushback, with fans rejecting 'official' names. Most notably this tend to occur for Type-Moon copyrights, with Altria/Altoria being the most prominent example. Fans just prefer some other spelling for their names and we follow likewise.

For works that are less 'in the spotlight', less marketed towards the English-speaking community, usually the first names people will hear off is going to be a romanization from a fan-translator, and these people tend to use the same waapuro-derived modified Hepburn system we use (main possible deviation being 'oh' vs 'oo', because spelling 'oo' tends to cause people to mispronounce it). Touhou names and terms in particular gets translated by the Touhou fandom pretty fast, and again, as mentioned, they use the same default convention as us, which is how the spelling "Fujiwara no Mokou" got solidified in the Touhou fandom and on Danbooru.

TL;DR: We have a consistent romanization system for romanizing Japanese names and other words; we tend to stick to this convention unless there's a good reason to make an exception (i.e. nearly all other people spell it in another way), the Touhou fandom tends to use the same default romanization system as us (because, really, we more or less started off as part of the same 'community' anyway), Fujiwara no Mokou is how nearly every single English speaker spells her name... and -1 to your proposal because it just introduces an arbitrary inconsistency all for no good reason.

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