Subject: Hi! Bye!!
From: [email-masked] (Wei-Hwa Huang)
To: [email-masked]
Date: 1 Sep 1996 06:54:31 GMT

Just decided to drop by again and add a few clarifications.

1)  "ryouga" vs. "ryoga"

Japanese lengthens vowels by "doubling" the vowel; for example, if you see
the kana for "chi" followed by the kana for "i", you're supposed to
pronounce it like "cheee" and not like "chi-yi."  The exception is a lengthened
"o" sound.  When an o is lengthened, the "u" kana is suffixed instead.
(This is partly because the "o" kana is reserved for special words and is
also a special prefix.)  So, Kuno's name is written with three kana in
Japanese: "ku," "no," and "u".  Many different methods have been proposed 
for writing the long "o" in roman letters.  A lot of use "kunou" because 
it's easier to type into a Japanese computer.  So, here's a partial list
of names that have long "o" in them:

Ryouga Hibiki (Ryoga Hibiki)
Ukyou Kuonji (Ukyo Kuonji)
Tendou Souun (Tendo Soun)

2) Ukyo singing songs

Ukyo's voice actor, Tsuru Hiromi, was the Megumi Hayashibara of the 80's;
seemed like she was getting all the good female seiyuu roles.  I don't
think she's very active in the idol field recently, so she probably 
isn't as gung-ho about singing anymore.

3) Gosunkugi

Gosunkugi is a normal kid who just believes in traditional (Japanese) 
mysticism.  At least, he's so desperate to get Akane that he'll try 
anything.  Rumiko Takahashi used him as a snoopy bystander, but the
anime replaced his early exploits with Sasuke and decided to emphasize the
mysticism part and introduce him later.

4) Video games

There were at least 3 PC Engine (Japanese Turbo-Grapx 16) games.  There were
5 Super Famicom games (3 fighting games, 1 RPG, and 1 puzzle game.)  One 
got released in the US as "Street Combat" with radically altered graphics,
the other made it across with only the voices and screens altered.

5) Ranma CDs

I'm pretty sure there's only one Doco Karaoke CD.  

-- 
Wei-Hwa Huang, [email-masked], http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~whuang/
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