I'm trying to create a name for my fictional character and I was trying to
translate something like "wolf of the snow" in Japanese. I was using Jisho.org
and Google translate (just because it reads the Kanji. I would never use it to
translate something) and I basically wrote ookamiyuki together, just to see if
it sounded nice. Strange thing is that the romaji translation comes out as
"Setsurō" and the pronunciation becomes "yukioino". What is that Setsurō?
Thank you very much!
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2019-11-24T10:51:33.747
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2019-11-24T23:49:16.840
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question
kanji manga names
Trying to create a name but something is strange
So first of all, Japanese kanji can almost always be pronounced in several
different ways, and which way they are pronounced will depend entirely on the
context (what other kanji or non-kanji (kana) characters they're combined with
in which ways). This is due to a long history of intermingling of meanings and
usages between Chinese characters and the Japanese spoken language (which is
not like Chinese in many ways), and in many cases pounding a lot of square
pegs into round holes, but I won't go into all of that in detail here. In
general, each one has at least one (possibly more) "on'yomi" readings (based
on the original Chinese reading), and one (or more) "kun'yomi" readings
(Japanese sounds assigned to the character for use in some Japanese words).

The short of it is that the characters for "wolf" and for "snow" each have two
different possible pronunciations:

  * 雪 (snow) -- "yuki" (kun'yomi) or "setsu" (on'yomi)
  * 狼 (wolf) -- "ōkami" (kun'yomi) or "rō" (on'yomi)

In general, a very rough rule of thumb is that when kanji are used by
themselves, the kun'yomi reading is usually used, whereas when they are
combined together into multi-kanji words, the on'yomi reading is more often
used (but this is only a very rough rule, and there are lots of exceptions).
This is why when you combined "yuki" (kun'yomi) and "ōkami" (kun'yomi)
together, you got "setsurō" (on'yomi) as a result.

(As for "yukioino", did you mean "yukioinu"? According to
[jisho.org](https://jisho.org/search/%E7%8B%BC), "oinu" (おいぬ) is an "outdated
or obsolete" pronunciation for "wolf" in Japanese (using the same kanji), so
I'm not sure what spit that out for you, but that's probably where it got it
from.)

All of this, of course, isn't even getting into the subject of Japanese names.
As I suspect you're already aware, names in Japanese are generally made up of
combinations of kanji characters (sometimes they're spelled out in kana
instead, but this is less common). However, even for common combinations of
kanji characters, the normal pronunciation when used as a name can be notably
different than when it would (potentially) be a Japanese word. There are also
many different kanji which can have the same sounds, so it's possible to come
up with several different written forms which are all pronounced as the same
name, and in some cases, you can even have a single kanji combination that can
be pronounced multiple different ways depending on whose name it is
(confusing!).

As it happens, "Setsurō" is actually not an uncommon (masculine) Japanese
given name, but it is generally spelled either 節郎 ("honor" + "son") or 節朗
("honor" + "cheerful"). Therefore, if you wanted to name your (I'm presuming
male) character "Setsurō" spelled 雪狼, the name would probably not seem out of
place (and if somebody read it they would probably not have a lot of trouble
pronouncing it correctly), but it would be a subtle thing as people would have
to know that the name is not spelled the usual way in order to know its true
significance (as is the case with many Japanese names in general, actually).

If you instead chose to have the character write their name with that
character combination but instead pronounce it using some other readings, you
could, but it would probably be confusing if a Japanese person actually
encountered the name, as they would assume when reading it that it would be
pronounced differently, and the character would likely have to keep correcting
people all the time (if they were living in a Japanese-speaking environment,
at least). There are some real people who do have this sort of problem too, of
course..
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answer