Er, no. His original Japanese name is リュウ (or 隆) which under Danbooru's romanization system is written as "Ryuu".
Posted under General
I can't think of anything to say to that except that it's obscenely stupid. He has an official English romanization associated with his name and has for many, many years, and this is a site primarily for people who - hey - are English speakers. It seems to me like the logical thing to do would be to try and make tags that fit that backdrop.
Unless you're actually telling me that romanization trumps sanity, in which case I think I need some advil.
Soljashy said:
If you think a romanization system that makes absolutely no distinction between a short and a long vowel sound in Japanese is better for people who - hey - are English speakers, then I'm here to tell you it's not.
So usability should be sacrificed in the face of phonetic accuracy? Jesus.
I don't see why usability should suffer. There is an alias system in place to take care of naming discrepancies like that. Someone just needs to put through an alias from the common spelling to what we're using and you should be able to search "ryu" and get your results without any additional effort.
Either way, I don't see what's so "insane" about having a standard system.
Soljashy said: I don't see why usability should suffer. There is an alias system in place to take care of naming discrepancies like that. Someone just needs to put through an alias from the common spelling to what we're using and you should be able to search "ryu" and get your results without any additional effort.
The reason it's not aliased is that "Ryu" is too common/short/ambiguous.
In these situations, "See" notations are placed in the wiki to make it obvious to users which tag is meant to be used. This is one reason why I still oppose the move that hid Wiki entries from the initial image results page (you need to click Wiki to get to it). There's a greasemonkey script someone here made to change that back but not everyone will have it.
Although in this case we also have the ambiguous tags system to fall back on, which makes it obvious anyway.
About the only thing I think we really need is a way to alert users that their saved tags and such have been affected. Without an alias a tag subscription breaks, which is unfortunate.
Well, this is why we now try so hard to get it right (and be specific) the first time. Old tags like "ryu" that existed before current quality controls will always pose a problem, but we've been chipping away at them successfully so far.
I just discovered this change while browsing.
Can I be the second to ask why "Ryu" was changed to "Ryuu"?
Capcom JP have spelt it Ryu (1 'U') in their games since 1987.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=181bEWh0KqI
No matter the "romanisation", that's how Capcom JP spell it, even in Japanese releases.
Did you read the rest of the thread? Danbooru policy is to use our own romanization scheme instead of the official romanizations, because official romanizations are often dumb, inconsistent, or both. jhx2154 agreed, don't bother him about it.
(And for the record, a tag search for ryu gives you a link to ryuu_(street_fighter) right at the top of the page. There is no longer any usability issue whatsoever.)
Kikimaru said: No matter the "romanisation", that's how Capcom JP spell it, even in Japanese releases.
You've been here long enough to have caught onto our policy by now, and it was even explained in detail long ago in a thread of yours.
And you shouldn't need to ask "why", there's a whole thread above your post about it.
Pretty late to the party here, but bumping for the following question: Isn't his original Japanese name 'Ryu' (written in English), since that is what is written beneath the life bar in all of his games? I understand that standards and consistency are valuable. But this one is a huge clusterfuck, and there are valid reasons to make any of several choices.
As I understand it: Names that are written in kanji have tags that are romanizations of that kanji. Names that are written in katakana will use official english/romanized versions for the tag sometimes but not always. I could be misunderstanding this.
I checked the リュウ page on Wikipedia for info on his name. It says that his name, which is written 隆 in kanji, is displayed in-game as 'RYU.' This leads me to believe that the kanji was probably only used in manuals, inserts, or other promotional materials. It also says that, while he has been given two full names - once in the Street Fighter movie (星 隆), and again in Capcom quiz games (武神 隆) - neither of them are official. I think the truth is that Capcom hasn't been consistent with its own characters' names, so any choice we make will necessarily be a subjective one.
Anyway, if we stick with the current scheme, I can understand that. But we have to change 'guy' -> 'gai' :S
Alternatively, we could choose 'what's in the game' as our standard. Tempting, although not without its own problems. To be fair, this seems to be the standard chosen for tags like 'm bison,' which would otherwise have been 'mike bison.' By this standard, it would seem his tag could be 'ryu,' whether you consider his real/game name to be Ryu or リュウ.
Before you flame me, I have been following this issue for some time: http://danbooru.donmai.us/forum/show/7666
Well-expressed arguments (either way) are appreciated.
Updated
Not flaming, but you listed our current version yourself when you posted リュウ, which is correctly romanized "Ryuu". "Ryu" is a inconsistent and misleading misromanization, this is super common in Japanese even in canon materials where people either use different romanization systems or just don't care.
We have defined a specific romanization scheme we agreed to use on here so everything is consistant, and it doesn't mesh with the canon romanization here.
I can read Japanese, so I understand that リュウ would frequently be romanized as 'Ryuu.' It didn't really seem important to me, because: 1) Names are frequently romanized using different rules than typical words. The most frequent English spelling of that name is Ryu. I understand this has no bearing on Danbooru's naming policies, but see #2. 2) Names that are not written in kanji do not necessarily use direct romanization anyway. So if the 'official' name is 隆, then yes it would be ryuu, but if the official name is リュウ, then it could be anything.
Poster child for this difference would probably be Asuka, but she's obviously something of an edge case.
I am unaware of any inconsistencies regarding 'Ryu' being used as the English spelling of リュウ. The english 'Ryu' is used far more consistently in the games than any other moniker that I'm aware of. And even the katakana リュウ is used far more often than the kanji, which I'm not even sure if I can recall seeing in any of his games, ever.
I'm not really expecting the decision to be reversed, even though I do think it's quite subjective in this case. To be consistent, however, we should definitely change guy -> gai, and arguably m_bison -> mike_bison, etc. (although awesome sensibilities probably rules out mike)
EDIT: The more I think about it... Asuka is the worst example ever. For anything.
Katakana and hiragana are just syllabic spellings, as opposed to kanji which are logographic and don't directly spell out the pronunciation. 隆 is pronounced リュウ or something like [ɾjɯː] regardless of how its romanized. Unless you have a terribly unreliable scheme for romanizing Japanese, it can't just be anything.
I suppose I'm not exactly correct when I say inconsistent, since you could consistently do just about anything you want whether it makes sense or not. I'm also not talking about constancy in English usage, since that's actually not what we have been judging by.
By consistency, I meant that a system that doesn't differentiate between long and short vowels has no way of telling apart say リュ and リュウ, which are phonetically different in Japanese.
I'm not sure what you are saying with Asuka, アスカ → "Asuka" is strictly by the book by most romanization schemes.
As for the other changes, I can't really comment since I never followed Street Fighter.
I get it. I actually do speak Japanese, honest.
My point was just that if your character's name is written in katakana, then we don't necessarily use the direct romanization of that katakana. You might find some anime where a character's name is only ever given as フランク, but here we would use the tag 'Frank' and not Huranku. Obviously.
Asuka Souryuu Langley -> Asuka Souryuu Ranguree, if we blindly stick with direct romanization. Which would be stupid.
EDIT: And, to be clear, what I was trying to say about consistency is that the name RYU (in roman characters) is used consistently and more frequently than any other alternative even in the Japanese games.
Updated
Con said: So if the 'official' name is 隆, then yes it would be ryuu, but if the official name is リュウ, then it could be anything.
He's Japanese. With a very generic Japanese name. Which is pronounced as "Ryuu". There isn't any ambiguity or subjectivity here. Unless you'd also support "Suzumiya Haroohee" because ハルヒ is in katakana and thus "can be anything". While there are cases where names are unclear, such as in made-up names, this is really quite clear cut.
I don't know anything about this ガイ person myself. But if 1) he's Japanese and 2) there's no plot-specific reason to use a western rendering (e.g. he didn't, like... move to the US and intentionally take up the name Guy as part of the plot) then it does sound like he should be Gai, yes.
guy is a terrible and potentially highly ambiguous tag anyway, and needs to be changed. It should really be guy/gai_(street_fighter).