Talk:Wuji

Moving Ooje to W.J.? Frankly, I'm not all too happy with the current romanisation myself, but I'm not gonna question it. For all purposes it's the best we got. That said, W.J. may have been the intent, but for pronunciation vs. spelling it's a linguistic nightmare (like B.H. was). The real problem is that we no current valid romanisation for the name in a language other than English, like we did for B.H. (Germanic) and Arc (French). If there's a language that has "Wu" and "Ji" as valid standalone letters I'm interested in hearing it.

Don't you just love Japanese and it's word games? :P JelZe GoldRabbit 15:55, 27 May 2013 (EDT)

I very badly want to be able to justify moving this to "W.J." and Sou to "Sw", since that's clearly what they're getting at, but it isn't what they got at, so I think it's probably outside our "authority", so to speak. -LV 16:25, 27 May 2013 (EDT)

French has "ji" for J, although the W still eludes me (but sometimes Japanese uses "ji" for words that end with a "j" sound, like Ravage). I just feel like the romanization should incorporate W in some form, because the intention is pretty obviously a "wu" sound. It's just that Japanese can't say "wu", like how they can't actually say "el". It can be "Wuji" or whatever. Mimi 16:32, 27 May 2013 (EDT)

In the case of Sou, I think he could be reasonably moved to "Saw". At least we'd get one part of the pun. Mimi 16:37, 27 May 2013 (EDT)

Except "saw" is properly rendered in Japanese as ソー (sō) and not ソウ (sou). I know, I'm being pedantic (not to mention it wouldn't matter spelling-wise in hiragana)... JelZe GoldRabbit 11:01, 28 May 2013 (EDT)

ソウ (映画) Mimi 11:18, 28 May 2013 (EDT)

ミュージックソー Musical Saw. So both ソウ and ソー are valid. Bleh. JelZe GoldRabbit 11:53, 28 May 2013 (EDT)

I know next to nothing about romanisation (read: actually nothing), but I'd agree that if the intent was obviously to call him W.J., and they merely lacked the ability to clearly communicate that in the alphabet they were working with, there's no reason this shouldn't be at W.J. Jalaguy 15:21, 28 May 2013 (EDT)

My only misgiving about this is that Takara does have unquestionable Latin letters in Arms Micron names; specifically, all of the variant versions of Mini-Cons released as AWM-xx toys have Latin letters as their name's suffix - for example, Zori M's packaging calls him "ゾリM", implying that, if they were so inclined, they could have called Ooji "WJ" without any ambiguity. The fact that they didn't implies that, for whatever perverse reason, they wanted his name to be a weird phonetic approximation. -LV 18:43, 28 May 2013 (EDT)

Aren't all the actual Latin letters simply designations for the variant versions? Like the M in your example standing for "Monochrome version" or Pral G being the "Gold version" or Dago (R) being the version that comes with Rumble? The pattern seems to be Japanese for the actual name (even if it is an approximation of a Latin letter/English sound) and Latin letters for the variant designation. Or am I missing something? --Khajidha 19:58, 28 May 2013 (EDT)

The fact remains that they use Latin letters, so the fact that the characters' actual names don't makes me hesitant to perform the kind of changes necessary to render "Oo" as "W". -LV 21:28, 28 May 2013 (EDT)

The names are katakana, which is a straight-up phonetic writing system. The "M" and "S" and the like are also given phonetic kama in tiny print above the Latin letters, and yes, it's "em" and "ess". I'd vastly PREFER to call them "W.J." and "S.W." and the like, but, for whatever idiotic reason, that's not their names. --M Sipher 03:10, 29 May 2013 (EDT)

It's primarily phonetic, yes, but "ウー" is frequently used to approximate the "Wu/Woo" phoneme (Search here with "#u-" for examples). Something like "Wuji" would be a totally acceptable rendering of the kana, and would more clearly indicate the link to Wheeljack. Since "W" has such a long name in English, its kana representations can range from "U" and "Uu" to even "Daburu" (double), so there's a lot of leniency for where you choose to insert it. Sw/Sow/Saw/SW would all be reasonable as well.KrytenKoro 10:06, 29 May 2013 (EDT)

This is B.H. all over again... Something for the Romanization page perhaps? JelZe GoldRabbit 10:25, 29 May 2013 (EDT)

I think "Wuji" is a good compromise between the two positions. Makes the connection to Wheeljack more obvious and still has the phonology. Mimi 16:20, 29 May 2013 (EDT)

I'm in favor of this. Sometimes I feel like his name just makes fun of the romanization mechanics because: 1) ウ (u) is often used as a substitute for the Latin W, and on it's own as a vowel it's nearly silent 2) ジ (ji) is the basis for the "j" series kana by combining it with "y" kana or a single vowel where applicable. Since common practices contract the result to ja, je, ju and jo, the joke here is that ジ can be interpreted as just "j". With those two things in mind. W.J. is the intent, but in English spelling vs. pronunciation it does not work! Who made these names anyway? JelZe GoldRabbit 08:15, 30 May 2013 (EDT)

So what you are all saying is that it is obviously supposed to be WJ but we can't actually say that it is WJ? Does that make any sense? --Khajidha 08:18, 30 May 2013 (EDT)

We would see W.J. as "Double-U Jay". The Japanese see ウージ and say "Ūji" or "Wuji". I think his name is more of a Romanized spelling joke like Iro was, except it only works in spelling. Where's the priority? JelZe GoldRabbit 08:34, 30 May 2013 (EDT)

"We would see W.J. as "Double-U Jay", yeah, and this is an English site. I think we are taking a "Romanized spelling joke" a little too literally here. --Khajidha 08:42, 30 May 2013 (EDT)

Again, if they wanted to call him "WJ", they could have, simply by using Latin letters, as they did in this very toyline for these very same Mini-Cons. For whatever reason, they wanted to call him something evocative of, but not actually, WJ. As much as I wish the Arms Micron names didn't suck, they do, and we shouldn't be changing them to things we like better. (I do think, from this discussion, that "Wuji" isn't an unreasonable adjustment.) -LV 09:38, 30 May 2013 (EDT)

And again, from the other side, the Latin letters haven't been used for names, only for variant designations. Several other Arms Microns have had names based on katakana representations of the initials of the English names. Why is this one, where the katakana are used to represent the sounds of W and J any different from others like O.P. and R.A.? How does this not fit the established pattern? --Khajidha 11:25, 30 May 2013 (EDT)

Because the Japanese spelling aka "pronunciation key" (Japanese is a "what-you-see-is-what-you-get" language) actually fits in English or any other language. "W" standalone would be "Double" in Japanese, or "way" in Germanic laungages, while "J" would be ジェイ (jei) or "jay" in Japanese and "yay" in Germanic. The joke here is that the actual pronunciation is truncated. Double Jay or Way-Yay would be incorrect for ウージ (Ūji). If anybody could pronounce "WJ" (no periods, so not as indivual letters) like "wudge" that would be perfect. JelZe GoldRabbit 13:29, 30 May 2013 (EDT)

Okay, here's my point, because to me you all still seem to be going around and around and around saying "Takara were obviously referring to W.J. but we can't call it that". If ウージ is the Japanese attempt at pronouncing the letters W and J, and "Double U Jay" is the English pronunciation of the letters W and J, and "Double U Jay" would be written in English as "W.J.", then WHY ISN'T his name W.J.? --Khajidha 15:40, 30 May 2013 (EDT)

Your confusion (or mine, but I'm pretty sure it's yours) is that "ウージ" is not an attempt to write out "Doubleyou Jay" syllabically. If they were going to do that, they probably would have used "daburu jei". What they wrote instead was a weird set of sounds related to the letters W and J, but not pronounced as them or standing for them. Why they wanted to do this is probably entirely unclear to anyone who is not a native Japanese speaker and perhaps even to those who are, but they haven't named him "WJ', they've named him, for lack of a better way of putting it, "W- J-" - the sounds those letters make, not the names of the letters themselves. -LV 17:14, 30 May 2013 (EDT)

"If ウージ is the Japanese attempt at pronouncing the letters W and J"... it isn't. It's pronouncing the sounds the letters make as best as katakana can approximate. Like Big Bird thinking there's actually a word pronounced "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz".--M Sipher 17:59, 30 May 2013 (EDT)

I kinda wonder why we never went with just calling him "Ūji" (or even "Ūj") in the first place. Or "Uuji"/"Uuj", if we didn't want to type "Ū" every time. --Sabrblade 14:05, 30 May 2013 (EDT)

'cause Oo look like little wheels so his name looks like a wee car.KrytenKoro 10:44, 31 May 2013 (EDT)

Mathematical. -LV 10:47, 31 May 2013 (EDT)

Are they the same guy?

https://twitter.com/TFU_INFO/status/1636123870846435329 like Wuji looks a lot like the fellow on the left. Are we sure its the same guy, or do we need to make a separate page? Poliwag06 (talk) 02:41, 17 March 2023 (EDT)

That's Wheeljack Kunai. He already has his own page. Ookalf (talk) 02:59, 17 March 2023 (EDT)

OK, thanks!Poliwag06 (talk) 03:05, 17 March 2023 (EDT)