Talk:Zou

Island Name
In the manga its Zou not Zoe. Phoenixs23 (talk) 16:59, February 27, 2013 (UTC)

Actually, it's Zō. So it could be either "Zoo", "Zou" or "Zo" in English.

So essentially, it could be anything but what it is now? 17:26, February 27, 2013 (UTC)

Yes, exactly, Zoe wouldn't be correct.

Apparently, Zō means elephant, as when I googled the katakana a bunch of elephants popped up and google translate says it means that too. We should rename the article to "Zoo" though, in my opinion.

Whatever we use is whatever the result of Forum:Name Spellings was. 17:44, February 27, 2013 (UTC)

Right, so it would be "Zo" then? Also, I found this.

Correct way would be Zou but we have to use Zo because of that forum. SeaTerror (talk) 18:54, February 27, 2013 (UTC)

There is no correct way since Japanese doesn't use the alphabet.

That's why romaji is a thing. The correct way would be Zou sincce it does mean elephant. Zō with the long accent mark would work as well. Zo is simply incorrect since it's not pronounced with a short "o" sound but with a long "o" sound. Reason why  いもうと and おとうと in romaji would be imouto and otouto respectively - they're long /o/ sounds. (Same thing with the Zou Zou no Mi). Giant Shy Guy (talk) 04:15, July 7, 2015 (UTC)

@GSG: We add japanese, romanization and official english translations in article infoboxes to avoid any confusion. We use english translations for titles. The forum JSD linked above is where we made the official decision to not use double vowels or macrons unless proved otherwise by an official source. Read the whole thing if you're interested (^_^)

To sum the forum up, some of the main reasons our site currently uses "Zo" are:
 * It's less confusing for our english readers to read.
 * In the real world, we do not use macrons or double vowels to translate names, places or titles (i.e. Koji- こうじ; Tokyo- とうきょう; Shonen Jump- しょうねんじゃんぷ))
 * The single vowel pronunciation is no different from the double vowel pronunciation anyway (In fact, now that I think of it, the single vowel pronunciation is closer to the Japanese pronunciation)

06:03, July 7, 2015 (UTC)