Nihao, everyone!

Being a person with too much time on his hands, I've been working on
figuring out what the proper romanizations for the non-toiletries
versions of the Chinese names in Ranma are. In the course of doing so,
I've found some things that may amuse.

Note that this is based on the standard (Mandarin) dialect of Chinese,
which is the only one I have any knowledge of or research materials
concerning. Those of you who actually know Chinese, please correct me if
any of this is wrong. I couldn't find anywhere on the web where I could
actually see these peoples' names written in Chinese characters, which
would have saved a lot of guesswork. If anyone knows of such a place,
please inform me.

SHAMPOO: Various web pages tell us that her name means "coral" + "raw
jade". Visiting the dictionary, there is a character meaning "coral"
pronounced "shan". Many writers, myself included, have used "xian" here,
but evidently this is wrong, and "shan" sounds a lot closer to the
"sham" of "shampoo" anyway.

Now, we note that there is another character that is an exact homonym
(the intonation is also the same)  for the "shan" that means "coral".
This one means a hill or mountain, or anything resembling same, and is
also a surname.

Moving on, the character meaning "uncut jade" is pronounced "pu". No
surprise here, except that there is again a homonym character, this one
means "breast".

So Shampoo's Chinese name is Shanpu, which is a homonym for something
that could be interpreted as "She who has breasts like mountains".
Coincidence? Or the multilingual punstership of Takahashi-sama?

MOUSSE: His name, according to info from the web, means "wash" +
"thread". The dictionary lists "mu" as "to wash one's hair", and this
character is a homonym for one meaning "eye". Yet another homonym of
this is a surname.

Looking for a second character, I found "si" meaning "a threadlike
thing". This is pronounced kind of like "szz", so "mu si" is a pretty
good approximation of the English "Mousse", better than some of the
other things people (myself included) have used. This very same
character also means "a tiny bit; trace". So "Mu si" as a pun on "He who
has only a trace of eyesight?" That's kind of pushing it.

COLOGNE: Listed as meaning "possible" + "rugged mountain place". This
would be "Ke Lin" as best as I could tell. Unless you are Inspector
Closseau, there are better ways to approximate the way you'd pronounce
"Cologne". So I may well be wrong about this one. I can't find any
really appropriate homonyms for this either.

Gary Kleppe
kleppe@execpc.com, Home page http://www.execpc.com/~kleppe
My fanfics and the FFML map are on my comics/manga page,
       http://www.execpc.com/~kleppe/comics