cool – Page 69

orangiah:

there was a twitter thread going around earlier about what nicknames people might actually give bokuto koutarou in japanese (hint: probably not “bo”), but a lot of the information and examples were pretty misinformed so i responded to a few points on twitter and thought tumblr might find it interesting, too!

(note: i’ve done a bunch of translation work so i do have some background and feel pretty comfortable talking about this, but as always, i’m not a native speaker and would defer to someone who is, and i welcome any further insight/discussion!)

starting with things i am 100% sure about:

“kou” is a perfectly good nickname! i personally know someone named koutarou who goes by kou (+ various suffixes) so i am very confident in this assertion.

if you know enough japanese to read kana you can google “コウタロウあだ名” (translation: “koutarou nickname”) and get a bunch of japanese people discussing nicknames for koutarou, which is a fairly common japanese name.

(ignore the first few google search results since that’s a nickname generator that spits out some awkward-sounding answers. although it does come up with “KOUTA DELUXE” so maybe there’s some merit to it after all :P)

some examples from the above links: “kou(-chan/kun/tan)” “tarou(-chan/kun/tan)” “kota(-chan/kun/tan)” and variations on shortening “こう kou”/”ろう rou” to “こ ko”/”ろ ro” but since koutarou is occasionally romanized as kotaro anyway this will probably just get confusing in english

some more creative/unique examples: “uu-tan” “koko-chan” “kouchirou” “kotaroro” “kokota” “kotapi”

i didn’t see this mentioned in the original post at all but “bokkun” is a VERY common nickname for bokuto in japanese fandom!!

the above are things i have sources for and feel pretty comfortable stating authoritatively. some extra stuff below that is prooobably accurate but i’m less sure of and you might want to take with a grain of salt:

re: other nicknames listed in the original post as possible nicknames

“kokkun” would probably just be “kou-kun”

“kotachin” is probably okay now that i think about it, but “koutachin” sounds a bit lengthy to me. googling “こうたちん” comes up with 637 results so it might be plausible, albeit not very common. in any case, as i mentioned above, because of the koutarou vs kotaro (vs koutaro???) romanization debate, i might be wary of anything that plays too heavily on the long vs short vowel if you’re using this for english fic

“bokutan” & “bochan” also sound awkward to me (the first a little less so) though this is 100% just me intuitively going “that sounds weird”

i agree with the original thread that “bo” is unlikely (therefore “bochan” is just as unlikely) and that japanese nicknames are almost never a single syllable. HOWEVER japanese syllable structure is different from english and “kou” technically counts as two syllables in japanese: “ko-u”

that’s all i have for now, but i’ll add more if i think of anything! feel free to discuss further since i always love talking about language 🙂