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Didn't know that and thanks for giving us the idea. Aibó sounds much better than Sidekick, we may need to rename :)


Please don't write it Aibó, though. The proper romanization is Aibō or Aibou. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepburn_romanization#Long_vo...


Unfortunately, neither English nor Japanese IME's on desktops provide any way to type Hepburn that isn't extremely awkward. E.g. on Windows if you want to type Tōkyō, you have to be in Hiragana mode, go letter by letter and pick from a list.

Since I'm originally from Slovakia, I used my Slovak IME, which is convenient for me.

Incidentally, Slovak has its own romanization of Japanese, which uses almost nothing but Slovak letters and diacritics (plus "w").

Wikipedia pages about 九州 and 四国:

https://sk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kjúšu

https://sk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Šikoku

The Hepburn system is an Americanism. Americans don't own the Roman alphabet or the way it should be applied to Japanese. Though Hepburn has official status in that it is taught in Japan, and used for the benefit of visitors. E.g. signs giving names of train stations or government buildings or what have you.


Fr what sort of romanisation system uses an acute accent for that. It's much more akin to the latin flat accent. But in reality just leaving off an accent or using the u is more convenient for typing.


A number of European languages use ó for indicating the long vowel o, rather than stress: Czech, Slovak, Polish, Icelandic, Irish, ...

According to Wiktionary, ō is used as a long vowel in two Latvian languages, and in Swedish as a hand-written form of ö (not always a long vowel). Also in Silesian, a language in a region of what is now Poland.


Even though Sony has taken the sidekick word, there are lots. The characters 愛(love), 相(together) have "ai" readings and are productive. The verb あう goes to an あい noun form that is productive for forming words like aizuchi. Plus various others.

aite

愛犬 aiken: beloved dog

相手 aite: companion, other party, opponent.

藍色 aiiro: indigo blue; 濃藍 koai: deep indigo.

...

https://jisho.org/search/あい%3F


and "jisho" means "dictionary" haha! loved the explanation, although I can only read the hiragana and love jisho too! have to get on with those wanikani exercises...


Isn't that already the name of Sony's robot dog?


It is.




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