jfine wrote:Translating from one language to another can be a funny thing. "Mosrite of Originals" makes no sense at all, not in English anyway! A friend of mine has a Mosrite "of Classics", made by Fillmore in Japan. Very nice guitar, but it would be nice if the model designation was a little less goofy. There's got to be a word in Japanese for "of", don't you think? They could even eliminate the "of" and call them Mosrite Classics. It would certainly be nice if Dana was able to put her name on them.
On the Fillmore Japan website, they had a blog featuring handwritten letters from Dana, in English of course, with translations in Japanese. I got Google to translate the Japanese back into English, and it was often quite different from the original English of the handwritten letters. "Bakersfield", for instance, came out "Bekazu"! I wonder if "zu" means "field" in Japanese? Trade names get even weirder--"Mosrite" becomes "Mozeraitu", and "Vibramute" turns into something like "Vaibaramyutu". I guess the Star Trek universal translator is still a few years off...
Well, I think it's interesting, anyway!
Yep, I can second what Dockrockrecords has said - it's just a case of the Japanese fitting an english word into their alphabet according to their phonetic structure. In fact, there is no 'V' sound in Japanese, for example, so 'Vibramute' would actually be pronounced 'Baiburamyuto'. These words would be written in Japanese in Katakana. The Japanese word for 'of' is 'no'.
The useage of 'Of California' seems to be a bit fluid in Japan. In 2004/5, when I visited Fillmore a couple of times, they were only labelled with 'Of Classics' and the people there told me they were not allowed to use 'Of California'. They also said it helped to distinguish their guitars as Fillmore guitars as opposed to Kurokumo who were, at that time, using both 'Of California' and 'The Ventures' on their headstock. Now Kurokumo have stopped that too I notice.