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Important info about your favourite brand (and symbol!) 
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Joined: Thu Sep 11, 2008 9:15 am
Posts: 1991
Car(s): 1965 Wasp, 1966 Bellett, 1967 Bellett, 1969 Florian, 1973 Bellett GTR, 1976 Buick Opel by Isuzu, 1978 Gemini van
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Hey guys,

So my cousin can read a bit of Japanese and he saw my ISUZU tattoo and told me something that was initially concerning; it doesn't spell "ISUZU"!

Attachment:
ISUZU vintage SYMBOL - resize.jpg
ISUZU vintage SYMBOL - resize.jpg [ 14.26 KiB | Viewed 7259 times ]


Well, it does; I certainly remembered the first two characters from my Year 8 Japanese class.

I = い
SU = す
...but ZU is = ず


ZU is the same as SU, except with a modifier that looks like a quotation mark ___ " ____ that gives it the ZZZ sound instead of the SSSS sound.

So what IS that symbol at the end of ISUZU?

He did a bit of web browsing and Wikipedia-ing and we discovered the reason for the inconsistency.

The hirogana symbol means 'repeat letter'. This is uncommon with regular words, which will generally just have the previous symbol a second time like we have double letters, however proper nouns (ie proper names) will sometimes use the repeat symbol.

Furthermore, when the symbol that is replaced (in this case ) has a pair of 'quotation marks' after it (as in " ), these are added to the repeat symbol, making.

I personally had no idea, although many years ago a girl I knew who was fairly fluent in Japanese noted that the symbol was not "ZU", but being a relatively obscure thing for a Westerner to know, she wasn't able to work out what it actually was. To be fair, the Japanese have three alphabets to get your head around and she was about 20, so I will let her off.

So yeah, ever since then I've had some doubt about the badge, but if people asked I dutifully told them it meant ISUZU...which it does....thankfully!

We worked out about half of it ourselves, then weirdly we found this website that told us EXACTLY what we wanted to know; how has this site been around since 2008 and I've only just found it!??!?

https://japanexplained.wordpress.com/20 ... -spelling/



Cheers,


Dave

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Tue Jan 17, 2017 12:05 pm
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Joined: Fri Apr 10, 2009 11:29 pm
Posts: 1524
Location: Kallangur, Brisbane QLD
Car(s): 3x1965 PR20(Donkey, Jenny n Bundy) 1 1969 PR20(Percy) 2 1968 PR20(Eugine n GT Donor) 1 1968 PR91 GT, 1 1965 Wasp
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dave wrote:
Hey guys,

So my cousin can read a bit of Japanese and he saw my ISUZU tattoo and told me something that was initially concerning; it doesn't spell "ISUZU"!

........

Dave


PHEW that was lucky.......
For a second there I thought you were going to tell us it was it was a copyright logo that translated

I
SU
U


:D

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Tue Jan 17, 2017 8:08 pm
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Joined: Sun Oct 05, 2008 10:21 pm
Posts: 528
Location: Darwin NT
Car(s): Isuzu Bellett, VG Commodore Ute, Custom Chopper
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Yep - I am off the hook as well because I sent Dave that logo after I did a high resolution redraw of it - SHEESH lucky it was correct!! ;)

Neil


Tue Jan 17, 2017 9:43 pm
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