Know Your Picture Characters Entry #69
A. 代衣鼻特 B. 之意藤憶留 C. 子也阿里伊 D. 安弥義依流
I’m posting late again, and it looks like this time the delay didn’t even give anyone the chance to get in a last-second submission. I will blame the slowness on . . . solar flares. Or wait, no: a syzygy. That makes sense.
As penance, I will go through people’s answers in reverse order, because I’m pretending that that’s more difficult for some reason. Dragon cleverly sidestepped the trap and did not guess that A was Abigail, even though the first character looks a little bit like a collapsing capital “A.” She is also roughly correct in her guess of how I was rendering her name with Japanese syllables; in this case, “Abigail” becomes abigeeru. Unfortunately, that’s where her correctness streak ended, because Abigail is actually located at . . . oh wait, she said D. That’s correct. Good job. Now, man’yogana were not intended to be used for their meaning, but if they were, then the name abigeeru here would mean something like “a current of all-the-more restful righteousness and dependency.”
Shirley was half right on her masculine/feminine guesses; A and B are the male names here, and C and D the female. She may be disappointed that she wasn’t able to pick out her own name, but she shouldn’t be too upset, as it’s one she herself described as lovely, impressive, and charming: C. In fact, maybe that was what she really intended all along, but modesty forced her to say that she thought this combination of positive attributes belonged to someone else. Our Japanese rendering of “Shirley” is shiyaarii, which is more complicated than everyone thought it was because we have to use two syllables, shi and ya, to approximate the sound sha. Of course, the system of man’yogana is over 1300 years old, and it would be silly to assume that all the sounds were pronounced exactly the same back then as the syllables they are associated with today. For example, what is now sa could very well have been sha back then. But since we can’t know for sure what it sounded like (recording technology was still relatively primitive in the 700’s), we’ll just go with this.
Shirley’s name is rather more difficult to give a meaningless meaning to, since it involves more obscure characters, but it’s something like “children doth be in a nook about 2.5 miles from Italy.”
We wish that A Fan would be sorry after he made that regrettable pun, but unfortunately his guess was correct: A is deebido, or David. He is “changing into clothes specially designed to accommodate his nose.”
And now it seems that Theoman finally knows everyone else’s pain, not having the first clue what to do here. His presumed name is, of course, located at B, and is read (in our modern way) as shiodooru. He is “fastening together recollections of these ideas of wisteria.” Sounds very Proustian.
Now that that painful ordeal is behind us, let’s try it again. Since Shirley seems to be so fascinated with English kings, let’s try picking out some of their names. Listed below are the four most common names used by the Kings of England, and the one most common name used by Queens of England. And we’re talking post-Norman Invasion, here, because I don’t know how to pronounce “Æthelberht,” let alone write it in centuries-old Japanese.
A. 位理英牟 B. 閉奴利怡 C. 自与於士 D. 愛梨社倍寸
E. 榎騰和足等
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4 Comments »
September 5th, 2011 at 5:13 pm
This is still man’yogana, right?
Okay, my guesses are Edward, George, Henry, William, and Mary. In order from simplest to most complex, the choices seem to go C, B, A, D, E. In order from phonetically simplest to most complex (in Japanese), my guesses go Mary, Henry, George, William, Edward. Therefore, I guess:
A: George
B: Henry
C: Mary
D: William
E: Edward
September 6th, 2011 at 9:16 am
That was a great pun! Anyway, contra Theoman, I assume we are looking for Elizabeth, as the most common name of a reigning Queen (does Mary count for one and a half, because of William and Mary?) I think he has the Kings’ names correct.
The key here is that this is the Know Your Picture Character contest, so we have to focus on who played these characters in a picture. Here goes:
A. Elizabeth–Good Queen Bess gets to go first, because of all the first rate English actresses who have played her, plus Cate Blanchett in those awful movies.
B. Edward–some pretty good kings. Longshanks was much better than Patrick McGoohan portrayed him in “Braveheart.” Edward VIII was nicely portrayed by Guy Pierce in “The King’s Speech,” even though they left out a lot of the Nazi sympathizing.
C. Henry–Henry II (aka, Peter O’Toole) was great; Henry V (Branagh AND Olivier) had some fine words for St. Crispin’s Day.
D. William the Conqueror was apparently once played by Bad Dumbledore, otherwise he’s been sadly overlooked in the movies. Olivier apparently once did William III in a TV movie.
E. George–Well, Colin Firth obviously. Plus the magnificent Nigel Hawthorne in “The Madness of King George.” But the greatest screen George was of course Hugh Laurie as the Prince Regent (the future George IV) in Blackadder III.
September 7th, 2011 at 9:35 pm
Of course everyone knows that England’s greatest king was QUEEN Elizabeth I. So, that settled, on to my answer re the numbers of Queen names, necessarily limited by the fact that there have been very few reigning Queens. The Elizabeths and Marys were each two, but people ignored Mary II, because her husband and co-ruler, William of Orange, was a fine soldier but hogged all the attention. He wasn’t even an Englishman for crying out loud! What proper Englishman would consent to being described as of orange? There was also a Jane Grey and an Anne. One each,though.
Now, the kings. Eight Henrys ( three great ones here, II, V, and that rotten husband, VIII. It’s hardly poetic justice but whatever you might think of his method of disposing of wives, he did a lot for England. Six Edwards and six Georges. There were four Williams. That settles what were the most common names of kings. We’ve already established who was the greatest king/queen. On to the answers;
A. William – Four Williams, four kanjis or whatever they are.
B.Elizabeth.
the most feminine looking name. and make no mistake, King Elizabeth was one heck of a woman.
C. George. I don’t know why except that every one else seemed to fit, sort of.
This is what’s left.
D, Henry. Lots of Henrys, lots of characters in the word.
E. Edward. Other than the VI who weasled out of being king for that tramp, they were an impressive bunch.
There’s an impressive bunch of characters in the word.
September 11th, 2011 at 5:03 pm
Elizabeth, Henry, Edward, George, and William. Did it without even looking at anyone else’s answers. I knew there was a reason I memorized that Sporcle quiz. Though there were also two Marys, technically.
Anyway, C looks the simplest and is therefore clearly Edward, since Edward VI died young. And was one of the Princes in the Tower another Edward? Man, I really need to learn something about British monarchs besides their order.
E looks the most complicated and is clearly intended to represent Henry VIII’s love life.
A is Elizabeth because it looks the most feminine to me. I have absolutely no basis for this statement.
B is William, because I really don’t know much about any of the Williams except that one of them did some conquering and one of them has his name in a college, and B looks the most confusing and forbidding to me.
And I’m out of ideas and have to say that D is George somehow, so I’ve decided that it looks like Colin Firth.