Language issues
Most of the comics in Yen Plus were originally published in Japan or South Korea, in the languages native to those respective countries. Given that, you may find it handy to know a little bit about the respective languages to keep in mind as you read through the comics in Yen Plus.
Manga and manhwa
Manga is the Japanese term for comics, and manhwa is its Korean equivalent. In English, manga has come to be used to describe comics from Japan, and manhwa to describe those from Korea. (In their native languages, manga and manhwa refer to all comics, regardless of their origin.)
However, beyond that, the inclusiveness of these words can vary from person to person. Manga is used by many to describe comics which bear a stylistic similarity to Japanese comics, but are not from Japan; Canadian Svetlana Chmakova considers her work to be English-language manga. Further confusing the issue, Yen Press often refers to all their publications as manga, including the ones from Korea.
However, others will argue that only comics created in Japan can be manga, and, likewise, only comics created in Korea can be manhwa. But then where does that put Maximum Ride, which is drawn by a Korean artist but so far only published by Yen Press in English, and may in fact never be published in Korean? Or what about Black God, which was created by a Korean team in Korea, but specifically for the Japanese market, in the Japanese language, with a story featuring Japanese characters and taking place in Japan?
To avoid this hairy linguistic confusion, I tend to stick with the geographically-neutral English word “comics” throughout this site when discussing the material Yen Press publishes.
Japanese
The people who first settled in what would come to be known as Japan likely sailed there from the eastern coast of the Korean peninsula, bringing their language with them - a dialect which subsequently fell out of use in Korea, making the Japanese language fairly distinct. The peoples who settled in the northern part of the arpielago came to be known as the Ainu, and in the southern islands, the Ryukyuans, which included several cultural groups including the Okinawans; these peoples developed their own languages mostly distinct from Japanese, though they fell (or were forced) out of use by Japanese political and cultural expansion.
Hanzi, or Chinese characters, were developed in China. This writing system was brought to Japan and gradually adapted to represent the Japanese spoken language around the fifth or sixth century AD, and came to be known as kanji. Major overlap exists between kanji and hanzi to this day, to the extent that a Chinese person could read a Japanese text (or vice versa) and be able to guess at the text’s meaning if not its pronunciation; however, many kanji have been majorly altered from their hanzi roots, and other kanji are completely original to Japanese.
The problem with kanji - and hanzi - is that, when a new character is encountered, it’s very difficult to guess how that character would be pronounced, even if its meaning is apparent. Seeing a need for a syllabic script, Japanese scholars began to use some hanzi to represent sounds instead of words, and from this two simpler syllabic scripts unique to Japanese were developed; katakana and hiragana. Today, hiragana is typically used for words for which the kanji written form has fallen out of favor, verb conjugation, particles, and other “word parts,” as well as to spell out the pronunciation of Japanese words, whereas katakana is used to write foreign or “loan words,” to represent sound effects and other non-words, and sometimes to represent Japanese spoken with particular emphasis, similar to how italics are used in English.
In literature, newspapers, and, yes, comics, Japanese is still typically written in the same manner as classical Chinese; in vertical lines which progress from right to left. This is why Japanese comics are printed and read “backwards,” and also why the word balloons are usually much taller than they are wide - which can sometimes prove awkward when translators try to cram horizontally-written English in them.
Following the post-war period of occupation by the United States, a heavy dosage of loan words from English were injected into Japanese, a trend which continues to this day - to the point where sometimes even well-established Japanese words have fallen out of favor for their English equivalent. (Sometimes that equivalent is oddly pronounced or unrecognizable in the context it is used from the perspective of a native English speaker. I was once greatly confused when I told a person in Japan that I lived in a small apartment, and they asked me if I lived in a mansion. I later learned the Japanese have adopted the word manshon to mean a (typically densely-populated) apartment building.)
Japanese names
Japanese names usually consist of two parts; a family name and a given name. Middle names are not used in traditional Japanese names. The surname (“last name”) comes before the given name (“first name”), though this order is almost always reversed when the name is used in English; thus we in America know of the great baseball player Ichiro Suzuki, but back in Japan he’s still Suzuki Ichiro. Both the surname and the given name usually consist of two kanji characters apiece, though given names which feature one character or even are comprised of hiragana are not unheard of, and some family names stretch to three characters. As in most of the west, brides typically adopt their husband’s surname upon marriage, and children will take their father’s surname as well.
Transcription
Spoken Japanese has relatively few sounds compared to other languages, and especially to English; with a few exceptions, all of these sounds are shared with English, so transcription from Japanese to English is fairly simple.
That being said, there are some differences in how it’s done, most commonly from how lengthened vowel sounds are represented. There are four traditional ways to represent lengthened vowels, all of which are in fairly common use, so there’s a lot of inconsistency.
Let’s go back to Ichiro Suzuki. In Japanese hiragana, his given name would be written as いちろう - i-chi-ro-u. That last う u character indicates that the -o vowel sound on the previous ろ ro character is to be lengthened. However, how is name is typically transcribed in English, “Ichiro,” that last u character is simply dropped, and not represented at all. This, in my opinion, is a fairly poor method of transcription, as it gives no hint to the reader of the transcription that the vowel sound should be lengthened to be read. Another method, however, would be to carry over that u and transcribe his name as “Ichirou.” Still another is to use an “h” to represent the lengthened sound; “Ichiroh.” And the fourth is to use an overlined vowel to signify that its sound is to be lengthened; “Ichirō.”
Each has its advantages and disadvantages. The “Ichiro” method (which is used for many Japanese cities you may know about; Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto all have lengthened vowel sounds which are not represented in their usual transcribed form) keeps things succinct at the cost of not indicating to the reader of the transcription at all that the vowel sound should be lengthened. The “Ichirou” and “Ichiroh” methods are more accurate, but run the risk that one unfamiliar with the language may try to “overpronounce” the added letter. Further, in “Ichirou” form, it can become ambiguous whether a “u” is extending the previous vowel sound, or is in fact a unique, stand-alone sound. (In case you were curious, those three cities in “Ichirou” form would be Toukyou, Ousaka and Kyouto.) Finally, the “Ichirō” form is the most linguistically accurate, but many people unfamiliar with linguistics may not know what they’re supposed to do with a vowel with a line over it.
Yen Press seems to prefer the “Ichiroh” method, though there are some inconsistencies; they’ve given us the comic Nabari No Ou, but transcribed the creator’s name as Yuhki Kamatani.
In order to prevent confusion, I’ve used Yen Press’s “official” transliterations throughout this site, even when they are inconsistent.
Honorifics
Japanese uses honorifics for just about every human’s name. (Honorifics are added to names to denote the status of that person; in English we have Mister and Doctor, for example.) Honorifics come after the person’s name, for example, Ichirou Suzuki-san. Here’s a list of common honorifics and what they mean.
- -san: A general-purpose honorific used for adults. Not quite comparable to Mister or Missus in English, because -san is gender-neutral and doesn’t imply any sort of marital status.
- -chan: Used for young children of either gender, or older female children; it may be used playfully among adults as well.
- -kun: Used only for male children. Like -chan, it may also be used among adults in a friendly manner.
- -sama: This honorific should only be used for deities, or mortals of ridiculously high respect, like the emperor… or your business’s customers.
- -dono: This one is somewhat analogous to the English honorific lord, both in its use (for people titled by royalty or otherwise of high respect) and in its archaic-ness.
In addition, some people may have their occupation or position at an occupation used as an honorific; for example, -sensei for teachers or doctors, or -kaichou for the chairman of a committee.
Korean
(Note: I’ve studied Japanese on and off for a few years now, but my understanding of Korean is more encyclopedic than from any first-hand use, so those more familiar with the tongue are more than welcome to contact me about any errors I’ve made below.)
Semantic similarities with Japanese may betray a distant common ancestor, but Korean is a distinct language, and there is some debate as to just how closely it could be related to Japanese - or Chinese, for that matter. It’s speculated that what we know as Korean is in fact the result of a melting-pot-like melding of several distinct languages spoken by the early peoples of the peninsula.
Much like Japanese, Korean scholars adapted Chinese hanzi to write their language, calling it hanja. Also much like Japanese, the desire for a syllabic written language manifested itself, resulting in the fifteenth-century of hangeul, a tidy syllabic script of circles and straight lines. Each hangeul character consists of one or more consonant characters plus one or more vowel characters combined in a particular pattern. Today, hanja is typically used only to clarify word meaning when similar spellings of common words would cause ambiguity, or for abbreviations on signs and other materials intended to be read briefly. Korean is almost always written horizontally from left to right, as with English.
The Korean language persisted through various periods of political and cultural domination of the Korean peninsula by its neighbors, including relatively recently; in the latter periods of World War II, the Japanese administration of Korea banned its use and went so far as to require its people to adopt Japanese names. These policies were promptly dropped after Korea’s liberation.
Following the establishment of two separate Korean governments following the Korean civil war and the strict cultural isolationism of North Korea, the language experienced some drift between the peoples on either side of the border; not enough to make them distinct languages, but there is a definite “northern accent” and “southern accent,” as well as some differences in pronunciation of common words and place names.
Korean names
Korean surnames are almost always monosyllabic. Given names typically consist of a one-syllable “generational name” shared by all of a couple’s children, plus a second unique syllable; however, this practice (shared with the Chinese and Vietnamese languages) may be falling out of favor. Like Japanese, the surname comes first; however, notably, English tends to preserve this order with Korean names even when it is reversed in names from Japanese, so we know of North Korean dictator Kim Il-sung and his son Kim Jong-il (surname “Kim”), and we know the current Secretary-General of the United Nations as Ban Ki-moon (surname “Ban”). Yen Press seems to usually go against this habit, however, telling us that Maximum Ride is illustrated by NaRae Lee (surname “Lee”) - but there is some inconsistency, as with Moon Boy’s Lee Young-you.
There’s also some inconsistency of how the given names are transcribed. Alternately, you will see them transcribed as separate names (Kim Jong Il), as a single hyphenated name with the second part capitalized (Kim Jong-Il) or not (Kim Jong-il), or as all smashed together with capitalization (Kim JongIl) or not (Kim Jongil). Yen Press seems to prefer the JongIl method, though again, there is some inconsistency, as with Black God’s Sung-Woo Park and Dall-Young Lim.
There is a remarkably small number of surnames in use in modern Korean, which explains why you tend to see a few of them, such as Kim, Park and Lee, used so frequently.
Transcription
Compared to Japanese, Korean contains a decidedly higher ratio of sounds which are unfamiliar to native English speakers; thus, there are different forms of transcription in use, each with their own quirks and inaccuracies.
Again, for consistency’s sake, I’ve stuck with Yen Press’s transliterations throughout this site.
