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Lieutenant General Gundam

Or it could be a name designed to sound similar for the reference without being identical.
 
Stuff like "White Devil," I get, because that is a deliberate reference to Gundam, but Reinforce to me sounds like, and I'm speaking as someone completely unfamiliar with Nanoha, just saying the English word "Reinforce" because it sounds cool.
 

If anyone is better at japanese than I am, this is the only official product I could find:

en.gundam.info

Cosmo Fleet Special Mobile Suit V Gundam Reinforce Junior Re. Goes on Sale in Late October! Pre-orders Begin Today! | GUNDAM.INFO

Parts of the bow can be exchanged to attach the Beam Shield!
en.gundam.info en.gundam.info
The line of Katakana seems to be that entire "Cosmo fleet special Reinforce Jr RE" title, and the end does match up with リーンホース, which is the listed translation on the wiki. As it's Katakana, that implies either way it's a foreign word being transliterated, and the direct transliteration of that is (R/L)i-n-Ho-su. With the fact the Li and Ho are long vowels I'd lean (heh) towards the Lean Horse translation, but it's not like transliterating fs into Japanese is easy.
 
I mean the box art makes the intent of "Reinforce" pretty clear but the toy guys don't necessarily agree with the anime guys all the time.

It's definitely リーンホース in Japanese though, that's unquestioned. The question is which plausible transliteration of that to Roman letters is the intended one, and Bandai's model guys at least picked Reinforce.

(Looking at it another way, there's two possible ways to transliterate Reinforce into katakana - the above is one, and the other would be リーンフォース, but UC Gundam is pretty inconsistent with how they do non-Japanese phonemes in kana).
 
Isn't the name said during the show? I've never gotten around to watching victory so maybe I'm misunderstanding something but this seems trivial to solve.
 
Nerdorama said:
Yeah, the name is said during the show. It's pronounced リーンホース. Mystery solved, I guess.
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But what are the physical sounds made by the actors? Japanese people are humans and therefore capable of pronouncing syllables that don't typically arise in Japanese if they need to. Is it that it's inconsistent and the actors say it in different ways depending on who is speaking?
 
Delirium said:
But what are the physical sounds made by the actors? Japanese people are humans and therefore capable of pronouncing syllables that don't typically arise in Japanese if they need to. Is it that it's inconsistent and the actors say it in different ways depending on who is speaking?
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Japanese has one liquid phoneme /r/, realized usually as an apico-alveolar tap [ɾ] and sometimes as an alveolar lateral approximant [l]. English has two: rhotic /r/ and lateral /l/, with varying phonetic realizations centered on the postalveolar approximant [ɹ̠] and on the alveolar lateral approximant [l], respectively. Japanese speakers who learn English as a second language later than childhood often have difficulty in hearing and producing the /r/ and /l/ of English accurately.
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Delirium said:
But what are the physical sounds made by the actors? Japanese people are humans and therefore capable of pronouncing syllables that don't typically arise in Japanese if they need to. Is it that it's inconsistent and the actors say it in different ways depending on who is speaking?
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In addition to what RoboRenee said, the actors aren't really trying to pronounce an English word, they're vocalizing the text in the script. It's not that there was an attempt to put a genuine foreign language in there, it's that a word or phrase was borrowed from a foreign language and transformed into Japanese text.

Think about the Kobayashi Maru from Star Trek. No one in Star Trek except maybe George Takei as a bit is going to pronounce Kobayashi Maru exactly like a Japanese-speaker would, even though Japanese is frankly a simpler language phonetically than English is. More relevantly, if a bit of the opposite direction, there's no official statement I'm aware of of how to write Kobayashi Maru in Japanese. We can make an educated guess of 小林 丸 (literally small forest + the typical suffix for ships in Japanese), but we can't be sure because a lot of different words are pronounced the same in Japanese, just like a lot of very different English words could be transliterated into the same Japanese pronunciation.
 
As written it's Lean Horse and while you can hear how people made the mistake in the line reads that is also how it's said. If it were actually Reinforce it would be written リインフォース or at the very least have a 'fo' sound in there. In saying that it being rendered as Reinforce in romaji on a toy box does make we wonder what the intention was. It seems kind of unusual for the products division to have also made that mistake but also have the katakana on there. So I can't say I expect it to stick any time soon lol
 
Speaking of the various stuff with Super Robot Wars and the other related SD stuff there are some very interesting designs located in that whole thing. Like an Aqua Jegan, a heavy land carrier which is named the Revil before we got the official canon Revil ship, and a few other different designs that I would love to see looking a bit more modern art style. Sigh.
 
The netting on the shoulder and the tank treads as applique 'scale' armour is a pretty interesting design choice for a Zaku, though maybe a Zaku is a little too big for the latter to be fully apparent at a glance. I'm not 100% sure they even are treads lol
 
Greener223224 said:
Shame I can't watch it - still waiting on watching an official release of the Seed Freedom dub before I can progress into 00.
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That doesn't even make sense in your original argument of wanting to understand references and influences. SEEDom came out like last month (in English), 00 came out in 2008. Just because it's a chronological sequel to SEED Destiny doesn't mean that it had any influence on the series released immediately after SEED Destiny, because it's physically impossible for it to have done so, and it's not like SEED Destiny is an incomplete story on its own. It's a badly told story, in my opinion, but it did have an ending and theoretically a thematic conclusion that 00 then went on to respond to.
 
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Nerdorama said:
SEEDom came out like last month (in English)
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Has it? I've heard it's going to be another month until it does.

The logic that the voices in my head are following tell me that I can't go into any spaces discussing Seed until I've watched Freedom, because it's the newest thing and everybody's talking about it and I need to know if they do anything that even slightly touches on the utter uselessness of Lacus, Athrun and Cagalli in the sub-franchise.
 
Greener223224 said:
Has it? I've heard it's going to be another month until it does.

The logic that the voices in my head are following tell me that I can't go into any spaces discussing Seed until I've watched Freedom, because it's the newest thing and everybody's talking about it and I need to know if they do anything that even slightly touches on the utter uselessness of Lacus, Athrun and Cagalli in the sub-franchise.
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Uhhhhhh....

Uselessness? I don't think they're useless. Badly utilised, I might concede, but being utterly useless? That's an interesting take, if ever I've heard one.
 
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