Pronunciation Note

February 2nd, 2010

I neglected to post a pronunciation guide for Kane’s name. It comes from the Japanese word kane meaning “money” or “gold” (I’ve been told both), not the traitorous Kwai Chang Caine “I will help you” kind of Kane. As I understand it, there are no silent vowels in Japanese so Kane is pronounced kä nā with the long a as in giant explody director Michael Bay. I’ve added pronunciation notes to the Cast page to make it more clear so when you read his name you hear kä nā in your head. I mean, I don’t think he’d get terribly upset if you mispronounced it. He’s dealt with it all his life. He’d probably just get dizzy from the speed with which he rolls his eyes at you.

In other news, Gary of the Webcomic Action News Team over at Fleen gave me some nice words of encouragement. Totally unexpected! Thanks so much! Thanks to all my twitter friends for all the lurv.


  • raize

    Hi Jami,

    Thought I’d chime in on the romaji (ro-maji) way of writing Japanese here. The word かね (kane） is also known as きん (kin) and represents money, gold, Friday.. etc. as you probably already know. It’s the kanji 金 – which you also probably already know.

    Different currently accepted ways of romajifying Japanese into English exist, but some of the more widely used and accepted ones are the revised Hepburn system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romaji#Hepburn), and the heibonshiki system that I could only find links to in Japanese.

    Writing kane as kä nā reads oddly because I see a line over both “a”s. If we’re to say that the “a” is a long a sound, like my good old canadian friend “eh”, then the name would sound like kay-nay. If we go with short vowel sounds, you get ke-ne.

    You should probably stick with Kane, and just note that the name is pronounced Kah-neh with short vowel sounds or something.

    Unfortunately, without knowing it’s supposed to be a Japanese name, I was reading it as Caine too ;) . You’ll just have to educate your readers and figure most of them will pronounce it wrong until they’re enlightened down the way :) .

    One last note, most Japanese people with 金 in their name (usually family name) typically come from Korean descent, you planned that on purpose, didn’t you?

  • http://ypcomic.com Jamie

    Ah, thanks for that Raize. I’ll change the way it’s written in the cast page so it’s more kah-neh.

    I didn’t know that about Korean descent. I used Kane because it’s my middle name. I don’t believe I have any Korean descent, but that’s pretty cool.

  • Jack T Robyn

    Your name is James “Money” Noguchi? That is sooo gangster.

  • http://ypcomic.com Jamie

    LOL!! J-Money in this mutha fucka!!!