![]() For example, the Japanese League of Legends page renders the name of the enemy character Kha’zix as カ=ジックス, with the double hyphen representing the apostrophe. Occasionally the double hyphen can represent other internal punctuation. And Jean-Claude Van Damme’s name would be ジャン=クロード・ヴァン・ダム. For example, Catherine Zeta-Jones’s name could be written as キャサリン・ゼタ=ジョーンズ, with the dot representing the space and the double hyphen linking together her two last names. You’ll occasionally see the double hyphen doing that same thing, but it’s rarer and when you do see it, it’s more often representing a western name that is already hyphenated. I could write it in katakana as ドゥルー・マッキー, with the dot in the middle representing the separation between my first and last names. In Japanese, the double hyphen (ダブルハイフン, daburu haifun) is one of the symbols used to separate first and last names being written in katakana. (Sega was not informed of this rule, it seems.) Often, the lines of the double hyphen are made at an angle specifically so a reader doesn’t confuse the mark with an equals sign. The example the Wikipedia page gives is cross⸗country, where cross⸗ lands at the end of one line and country at the beginning of the next, to show you that it’s meant to be cross-country and not crosscountry. In English, the double hyphen shows that a divided word is actually meant to be hyphenated and is not merely hyphenated as a result of landing on a line break. These are not equals signs but double hyphens, a punctuation mark used differently in English and Japanese and rarely used in either. The answer, of course, lies in Japanese - specifically, the various ways the written form of this language can demonstrate the break between someone’s first and last names. ![]() I just plunked in a quarter and got going on bashing bad guys, but the whole thing made me feel like that Simpsons joke with Lisa and the Yahoo Serious film festival: “I know those words, but that sign doesn’t make any sense.” So yeah, to restate the scene: I’m a little kid in an arcade, fairly ignorant of the world and trying to make sense of a bunch of words that don’t seem like they’re used in a way I’m familiar with. (And yes, that is a strange choice for a name, as I explain in the miscellaneous notes section.) The way his screen introduces him with that equals sign, however, you might conclude that his name is Ax, with Battler perhaps being his class: “Ax = Battler,” if you will, or “Ax is a Battler.” But no, immediately below this line is “The Barbarian,” which seems to reframe him as something else. These screens display identically in the English and Japanese versions of the game, BTW.įor example, the main hero is named Ax Battler. If you were, in fact, in arcades back when Sega’s barbarian brawler Golden Axe stalked the earth, you may have noticed the unusual way the four main characters were introduced in the attract mode. Decades later, I have an explanation for what I was looking at, and I’m betting I’m not the only one who was wondering. I think of this post as the second in a series beginning with the one about Blanka’s name: a thing that confounded me when I was spending time in arcades as a kid and just watching attract modes play on a loop. A fair warning: For this post, I’m taking the thrilling world of Conan the Barbarian–style sword-and-sandal adventures and turning it into a post about… punctuation.
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