There are some pretty hilarious place names in the world, like Hell, Michigan, Hookersville, West Virginia or Lord Berkeley's Knob, Scotland. There are some that sound funny to the Japanese, too. The second largest city in Idaho is Nampa, which happens to be a common slang term that roughly means "girl hunting," what bored young people in Japanese cities usually do on weekends. The Boyne Valley near Dublin, Ireland causes snickering when rendered into katakana, since boin is the sound of soft, round things going, well, "boing." In Holland there's a town called Scheveningen, which comes out sounding like sukebe ningen in Japanese, meaning "depraved human being" (I'm sure they could use some of our T-shirts there). In Texas, Michigan and Alaska there are towns with the name of Onalaska, which happens to sound like onara-suka, which is "Did you have flatulence?" in polite Japanese. The prefecture of Siliana in Tunisia gets more attention than it otherwise would, since it sounds like shiri and ana, a person's rear end and hole, respectively. The most common "catch-all" Japanese insult is baka, meaning "stupid," but in Osaka they prefer the term aho, and I'm sure the town of Ajo, Arizona gets at least a few additional tourists each year because of this name. But the strangest accidental place name would have to be Eromanga, a mining town that's the farthest point from the sea in Australia, with a name that sounds like manga comics that are naughty. Similarly, there's an island near Australia named Erromango, which got miss-transliterated as Eromanga in the Nintendo Wii weather program, making it an instant legend in the eyes of Japanese gamers.
5 comments:
Eastern Pennsylvania seems to have quite a few oddly named towns. I grew up in Reading. Nearby are the towns of Blue Ball, Intercourse, and my favorite -- "King of Prussia".
Why I have never heard of Onalaska I do know of the town of Unalaska, whose Russian name is similar to Onalaska.
Heh, Blue Ball, that's great. I guess they didn't mean then what they mean now. Then there's the really rude place names, like Negro Bill Canyon, which didn't used to be called that...
The transliteration makes these odd names appear more often in Japanese than they otherwise wood, since we wouldn't think of "aho" and "ajo" as being the same, unless they were written in Katakana. But "Eromanga" is spot on ^_^
My boyfriend (he's Japanese) had quite a laugh as we drove past a sign announcing we'd entered Yavapai county, Arizona. (yabai+oppai)
That's a good one. The worst word in Japanese is "manko" (meaning the female genilitia), and there happens to be a place name in China with that name. There's a video I saw of newscasters trying to do a report about the place without laughing. I felt sorry for them. Also, to say "10,000" with the counter for small objects comes out as "manko," resulting in this silly video, that revels in hearing the word on TV, even though it's not quite the same thing.
Post a Comment