Post by Pawel on Jun 10, 2023 18:11:21 GMT
What sent me down the rabbit hole was wondering how you say "Poseidon" in Chinese. Most European languages (except Greek, but I'm not sure that matters post-Blight) use the localized spelling of Poseidon, and Japanese can follow suit with ポサイドン Posaidon, but Chinese has its own naming convention for planets that's shared with a bunch of other languages in East Asia.
I am a fanwriter and can't establish canon, but my guess-proposal is that Poseidon's Chinese name would be 波王星 Bōwángxīng "Wave King Star," alluding to both the planet Neptune (海王星 "Sea King Star") and the phonetic 波塞冬 Bōsāidōng used internationally.
Hanzi working how they do, one happy side effect is that the character 波 is usable as a shorthand for anything Poseidon-related - most notably Long John, which would be 波矽 bōxī if you're Taiwanese, 波硅 bōguī if you're anyone else, and calqued as "wave silicon" either way. (There's definitely a proper scientific translation for xenosilicates, but I can't guess it and it's not what you use outside of newspapers and stuff.)
In Japanese 波 is pronounced ha, resulting in the planet being Haōsei and Long John being 波珪素 hakeiso. (You can use ロングジョン rongujon casually but that's not what you find in dictionaries.) 日波 "Nichiha" deserves special mention as a shorthand for planetside NIS operations; if you're around Simushir in any capacity you'll definitely see and hear it a lot. (Hinami is a rarer reading of the same kanji, and Nichinami's an outright incorrect one, but the NIS probably trademarked both for branding purposes.)
In Korean 波 is spelled 파 and pronounced pa, which gets you 파왕선 Pawangseong "Poseidon" and 바규 pagyu "wave silicon" — but since Korea's officially the Chaoxian Autonomous Region or something these days, this doesn't have to matter if you don't want it to.
Again, take all of this with a grain of salt; I can't establish canon. But I do know just enough to offer plausibility.
This is an excellent research trip and some very cool naming choices. I remember us having lots of fun at uni discovering direct translations of Chinese names for various towns in my homecountry.