Uchū – Color palette for internet lovers

Is there any reason to use the word uchu? It seems like almost everything (colour schemes, AI models, startups, tools, apps, ...) is named using a single randomly-selected Japanese word these days. But... why?

Sorry to be negative, but it does seem kind of overdone now.

Funnily enough in Japan the same thing happens with seemingly randomly-selected English words, so I suppose it's not completely without precedent.

Newer generations growing up more familiar with Japanese culture (e.g. anime), videogames, and non-retro cultural references, naming things after words they find pleasant (for a lack of better word) to hear.

"uchū" means "universe" in Japanese. I use this theme for all of my projects so...universal.

I can't speak to anything else but personally, I love Japan style/aesthetic/whatever so I'm gonna use a word if it fits.

Short, pronounceable words are scarce. If you want a 4-6 character project name Japanese words often fit the bill. Japanese culture is also very well exported.

The Chinese (on e.g. AliExpress) do this, too. With... mixed results. Small typo's, for example. Intentional (NOKlA) or not. Or, case in point: "NICGIGA is a technology enterprise focusing on communication network products. We have a perfect R&D team and Reliability laboratory."

Japanese words are just better Feng Shui. Everybody knows that.

"uchu" translates closer to "space" (spaceship -> uchusen), (alien -> uchujin), "I want to go to outerspace" -> "uchi e ikitai".

You can't sub universe in those. Yes, a dictionary may use that translation, but watch a space documentary and they won't use "uchu" by itself for "universe".

Also, in English, "universal" and "universe" are clearly related, but in Japanese, the concept of "universal" has almost nothing in common with "uchu"

I don't think you actually understand how the translation works here.

There is too much products or brands using a single English word being released too.

It's more like space / cosmos.

I mean it’s a color space. ;)

And you can say: “I choose you, Uchū!” ;)

But yeah, jūiro would have been more fitting.

It’s true that the concept of ‘universality’ wouldn’t be expressed using a word like uchu — perhaps more likely something like fuhenteki (普遍的) or just fuhen ? — but this is how one Japanese dictionary chooses to define uchu:

あらゆる存在物を包容する無限の空間と時間の広がり。

So it (if you trust this definition) refers to time as well as space. It’s slightly more abstract than just ‘space’.

The Japanese entry corresponding to the English Wikipedia entry for ‘universe’ is also called 宇宙, though it is of course effectively about space.

…considering it further, I think you’re completely right. I’ll leave what I’ve written above in case it’s of interest to others.

What's next: 本(běn), "the root of all colors"?

Does it bother you to have a product name like Galaxy or Forester?

It seems very odd to me that somebody would complain about single-word product names. Or are you complaining about the origin language? Or are you just jealous that somebody is using a two-syllable word instead of something like Navigator? Or perhaps you are peeved it isn't a single-syllable name like Chrome. Is a word like Ubuntu ok if it isn't Japanese? Or do you mean that words like Twitter and Yahoo should be phased out and everything should just be a single letter like X?

My apologies for not being fluent in the Japanese language.

I didn't look deeper than WordHippo[1] for translation.

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[1]: https://www.wordhippo.com/what-is/the/japanese-word-for-244f...

There are too many people who seemingly forgot that the word "are" exists

Genuine question as an amateur, what would be a better translation for "universe" than 宇宙?

Then don't use words you don't understand fully? Seems stupid to me to use a whole culture as your "aesthetic".

Lmao, HN will complain about anything. Leave the guy alone

It's amazing LOL

I could never be bothered by them

Which Galaxy? Do you mean Galaxy, Galaxy, Galaxy, Galaxy or Galaxy?

Throwing stereotypical random Japanese language and culture references around isn't exactly a new phenomenon, otaku culture and all. If anything, it can be considered retro at this point.

IMHO, it's more misleading than helpful to try translating single words, devoid of context. That said, 宇宙 and 全宇宙 are definitely used in space documentaries and academic cosmology contexts where English would use "universe", so I'm not really sure what OP in on about.

If you go back 150 years, you're more likely to encounter 天地 where now you'd see 宇宙, while the former incidentally does invoke the spiritual or religious overtones that "universe" can have, albeit those are stronger in 天地 as a function of it being a tad archaic.

You might see 万物 or the lyrical 森羅万象 where English uses "universe" to mean "all things"; 世界 when talking about a person's universe/world; 領域 for delimiting a universe or domain of consideration; 全人類 in places where English is being poetic about humanity; or even 宇宙 in certain mathematical contexts.

Those are just off he top of my head, but I think you get the drift.

> Intentional (NOKlA)

I'm not sure what your point is exactly, but fwiw, Nokia is the name of the Finnish town from which the Nokia company originates. They used to make rubber products such as rubber boots. I once had a bike with Nokia branded inner tyres (same logo, just without the "Connecting People" payoff). There's absolutely nothing Japanese about the word "Nokia", except maybe in the eye (ear?) of the beholder.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia,_Finland

I'm not as bothered by it as you seem to think; I was more just pointing out that the trend of naming everything after random Japanese words is a bit stale — especially if there's no relation to Japan and you don't speak Japanese.

> Or do you mean that words like Twitter and Yahoo should be phased out and everything should just be a single letter like X?

Yes. Apart from my children, who will be named things like X Æ A-Xii.

I suppose that short Japanese words have the advantage of being something that the Anglosphere knows about enough to be acquainted with, distant enough to not have too many opinions about, while also being easily pronounceable from the transliteration. If so, I'm going to provide a few examples:

Other candidates with easily pronounceable romanizations (from an Anglophone perspective) that are more culturally proximate than Japanese: Italian, Spanish, Russian, Hawai'ian

Other candidates with easily pronounceable romanizations (from an Anglophone perspective) that are more culturally distant than Japanese: Other Austronesian languages including Tagalog and Malay/Indonesian. (and many others, but fewer speakers)

GP is referring to "NOKLA" phones[1][2]. The "L" is intentionally lower-cased to make it look like a capital "I."

[1] https://www.engadget.com/2009-04-01-keepin-it-real-fake-part...

[2] https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/nokla-mobile-phone.html

I suspect rather [Nokian tyres](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokian_Tyres), rather than Nokia.

Either way, yes, Nokia is for sure a Finnish word, not a Japanese one, but the confusion has been around [for more than quarter of a decade](https://www.wired.com/1999/09/nokia/#:~:text=A%20surprising,...)

And yet, here you are, complaining about people complaining.

Having heard enough Americans cringe-inducingly mangle Japanese, I’m going to have to disagree with you there. I had someone serve me an order of ’guy ohza’ just a couple of weeks ago. If the people selling the products can’t even pronounce the names correctly, I definitely don’t want to hear the customers’ attempts.

yeah if i had to pick a single word it'd be "cosmos"

No, this is just how languages generally work, how loanwords come to be, and how cultures influence each other.

I definitely had Nokia wellies in the mid eighties. I think the boots-and-tyres brand name changed from Nokia to Nokian around 1990-ish.

Japanese and Scandinavian design have a long history of simplicity and subtlety; addition by subtraction and minimalism. Makes sense for projects with those principles in mind.

What's interesting to me is that a "good enough" approximation of Japanese phonology is pretty easy for native English speakers to express. The issue is just they have to understand the really consistent syllable structure to parse it out of the romaji.

You have a point, English proper lacks the semivocalic-i after a consonant (as /Cj/), except where followed by /uː/. So also "Bee-ORN" for Björn, and "MA-fee-uh" instead of Italian "MA-fya" for mafia.

Oh wow I had totally missed that. Nasty!

Yes but this once was the same company.

Eg this image from your Wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokian_Tyres#/media/File:Nokia... even has the same logo/font as Nokia used to have on their phones (except rendered here as an outline).

The 'Universe' wikipedia page in Japanese is this: "宇宙"

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%AE%87%E5%AE%99

"宇宙" seems to be pronounced "Uchū" by google translate. So uchu seems to very much translate to "universe". Maybe it's just not as fashionable to use in a documentary?

I can't comment on universe vs universal.

Who exactly is hurt by the naming of this project?

I interpret uchuu as "space"

Pinterest names their design system "Gestalt" but they're not a German company. GitLab names theirs "Pajamas" but they're not primarily Urdu speaking.

That's not at all incongruous. If I'm saying "You are complaining about something stupid", I am not necessarily criticizing the concept of complaining itself, which would be hypocritical.

I seriously hate this argument. "You are nit-picking", "and here you are nitpicking my nitpicking, interesting that we are on exactly equal ground now". It's a dumb turn-around that could be used to attempt to silence any criticism of any criticism.

Sometimes, a criticism or complaint is not valid or frivolous. Pointing that out is not inherently invalid or frivolous.

Is this "stealing"? Is it stealing any time somebody in another language uses a borrowed English word?

This is a pretty extreme reaction, honestly. I fail to see how a minor misunderstanding of a Japanese word could possibly affect anybody negatively. Could you give a single scenario where this use of this word is harmful?

Huh! My apologies, you are absolutely right.

That’s basically how words are borrowed from one language and brought into another.

Your second example is a bit disingenuous since the word ‘pyjamas’ is a perfectly normal English word, regardless of its etymology.

As for the first: there isn’t a silly trend of naming everything after randomly-chosen German words, so at least it’s fairly original.

I don’t think it is. It’s not random. Words are borrowed because they’re useful and fill in some gap or serve some new purpose.

I already pointed this out above. It translates to ‘universe’ as in ‘space’ but not really ‘universe’ in the sense of ‘universal’.

Anyway… this business of translating individual words is basically nonsense.

Things need names. All the simple English words have been used many times. Seems logical to me.

In practice, language has no bounds or rules. You can literally name anything you want with any name you feel appropriate. This cultural gatekeeping is so pedantic

I picked the second example exactly to elicit a response such as yours.

It's ultimately a word from a foreign language. At some point it got used by English-speakers and then it spread and got used more and more.

Lots of foreign words get used. Some catch on and some don't. That's just how language evolves. Pajamas is just an example of a foreign word in a late stage of this evolution

As a native Japanese, we think it means "universe" when I hear it. And in my opinion there are no people who think it means "universal".

'Gestalt,' like 'pajamas,' is also now an English-language word. (Though, admittedly, I think people use it with some level of awareness that it is borrowed from German. So it's different from 'pajamas' in that respect.)

I would have thought that the explanation for the phenomenon you highlight is obvious: there is a strong current of Japanophilia in U.S. culture generally, and especially among the tech-minded. So, while people borrow words from languages around the globe, Japanese is especially well represented. I'm surprised people seem reluctant to acknowledge this.

Edit: German is another interesting example. Though perhaps among different people and different reasons, English speakers (at least Americans) do also seem to have a special fondness for German words. Gestalt, zeitgeist, schadenfreude, ersatz, etc. For me, these are evocative of the golden age of German-language science and philosophy running roughly from Kant through Jung. For product names, though, German words may tend to be a bit too long and challenging to pronounce for an Anglophone audience. Perhaps this highlights another reason for the popularity of Japanese for this purpose: in addition to providing a pool of 'cool' sounding words without preexisting connotations for English speakers, Japanese seems to have an abundance of short words that an English speaker may find easily pronounceable. (Not to say that the words are necessarily pronounces correctly from the perspective of a Japanese speaker.)

Wait till you see their cat named "Neko".

That was informative. I always thought it was a company founded on the principle of expressing disdain for a certain korean auto manufacturer.......

In that case I don't see your point. We're talking about words that are entirely foreign — not loanwords.

In the same vein, it's annoyingly difficult to argue against accusations of being argumentative.

Or because they differentiate you from others. English is full of that; there's "cow" for the commoners (from Germanic) vs "beef" for the rich (from French). Or thee/thous for commoners vs you (from French 'vous') for the rich. I suppose the new purpose in those cases were to differentiate from the lower classes.