Hacker News Reader

Comment by contingencies | Hacker News Reader

The e-Kakashi system has a really unfortunate name if you happen to speak some French and Chinese. Unfortunately, if you are a winemaker you are quite likely to speak some basic French, at least, and the fastest growing wine consuming market in the world is China. This could be a true classic ass-in-mouth for the international marketing coursebooks.

View on HN

Good point, but we're fine, people dealing with wine got past 5th grade hopefully.

(we had the same point on saying "bit", it was the funny to no end when I was a middle schooler and we got over it)

What's so funny about "bit"? The Urban Dictionary provides "short for bitch" - is that it? (Non native speaker here.)

"bit" in French means "dick" (though the spelling is slightly different, being "bite"). Then again "god" is a shorthand for "godemichet" which means "dildo" (spelling again being slightly different: "gode").

And of course, 30 Rock demonstrates this in the episode where the characters brainstorm names for a pocket-sized microwave. Everyone agrees that "BiteNuker" is the perfect name... until somebody points out that it's vulgar in both French and Dutch.

For reference, neuker is Dutch for "fucker".

(and of course, this episode teaches us a valuable lesson for marketing people in real life too... just ask the people who named the Mitsubishi Pajero, Honda Fit, and Buick LaCrosse)

What are the offending words in French and Chinese?

Two different classic words for excrement, caca and 屎 (shǐ).

If that's the case then 屎 would appear all over Japanese, it's literally one of their syllables.

It seems it has the same meaning in Japanese as well.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%B1%8E#Kanji

That Kanji may be pronounced "shi", but dozens of other ones are too [1], so it'll depend on context. Kanji are more like roots in English words than they are words themselves. (Many words consist only of a single Kanji, in a way that English doesn't have a whole lot of words that are just roots in isolation like "geo" or "hydro". But I'd still say you're better off analogizing them to roots than words.) Certainly Japanese speakers aren't hearing "poo" every time they hear "shi".

[1]: I assume. I'm not counting. But most sounds are covered dozens of times over from what I've seen.

The Chinese word shi3 has a different tone than し, which in Mandarin would be shi1 or shi4. Chinese speakers are not going to confuse every use of し with shi3.

They may share the same Romanisation form, but Japanese shi and Mandarin shi sound totally different.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com