Japan’s use of English is, historically, not great. From beverage companies that think Calpis and Pocari Sweat are fantastic names to the advertising agencies that think putting “Let’s” at the beginning of any random word makes a great ad campaign, Japanese English is a whole thing. Car companies are especially prone to twisting the language into all kinds of weird configurations.
For every car name that kind of makes sense - the Nissan Cube, the Daihatsu Move, possibly even the Honda Life - there are several dozen that make no sense what-so-ever. Or, worse, make a horribly wrong yet perfectly coherent sense. Looking at you Pajero, Laputa, and Naked.
Sitting comfortably between these extremes are the ones that could make sense, maybe, if you look at it in just the right light after just the right number of beers. Like my wife’s car, the Daihatsu Canbus. That’s not a typo: the name of this vehicle is the C-A-N-B-U-S. And don’t get me wrong, it’s a great little car. Reliable, smooth, efficient, and cheap. But Canbus?
Perhaps, it’s just a misspelling of campus? That would make a certain amount of sense. After all, this little car is the perfect size for taking the kids to school, i.e. to their school’s campus. I mean, for a car that looks quite a bit like a Runabout from Star Trek Deep Space Nine, and one that serves much the same purpose, campus is not a bad name.
But. Campus is not found in the New General Service List, a collection of the most common, and therefore most commonly taught words in English. It’s my suspicion, based on nothing but experience and intuition, that when these massive car companies decide on names for new models, they try to find words that have at least some recognition from the general populace.
My next guess is still a spelling error, but one that’s a little deeper, one that comprises two errors: what if they just mean canvas?
This makes a little more sense, at least from a linguistic point of view. With campus, it can be hard to argue for an error because Japanese distinguishes between the /b/ and /p/ sounds quite easily (although not /n/ and /m/; sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t). Less so, however, with /b/ and /v/. There are several instances of a word being borrowed from English into Japanese with a /v/ not-so-subtly turned into a /b/. Witness “viking”’s transformation into “baikingu” and “TV” into “terebi.”
The second syllable mistyping of the vowel is also easily understood as /ə/ which can be written with either /a/ or /u/. And then, just to belabor an already tedious point, there’s the verb usage of canvas: to cover large areas, like when you canvas a neighborhood for a census or you canvas a campus to hand out flyers for a game. Holy smokes, I think we’ve found our answer.
However, when I present this cleverly reasoned deduction to my wife, prepared to lay out my etymological, typographical, historical, and general linguistidunal1 analysis, she says, “They just meant ‘can’ and ‘bus’ didn’t they?”
Well, shit.
She’s probably right. In addition to having an innately better grasp of both the Japanese language and Japanese culture she’s far more sensible and logical than I am. Can. Bus. Makes perfect sense. As I said earlier, this boxy little car is the perfect size and shape for bussing people around the neighborhood. Bus them to the shops, bus them to the station, bus them to the campus where they can canvas their friends for the right kind of canvas to buy in order to drape the bus stop in canvas.
Oh, and by the way, here’s a little nugget of information from Wikipedia:
The name "Canbus" is a combination of the verb "Can", describing the car's ability, and the noun "Bus", describing the car's bus-like shape and inspiration from the Volkswagen Type 2, which was also known as the “Bus".
It’s tempting to try to pass this off as a counter-lesson2 in the dangers of folk etymology and letting your imagination get ahead of your logic and research. But the only real lesson here is, damn it, I should know better. Maybe one day, but I doubt it.
Tangentials & Parentheticals
From Kottke this week comes news of The Avengers having been dubbed into Lakota by the original cast. This follows on a lot of news in recent years about various intersections between Hollywood and Native American languages, like Disney releasing a Navajo-language dub of Star Wars (which Kottke also mentions) but also 2022’s entry into the Predator franchise, Prey, which has a full dub in the Comanche language done by the original cast. This is all fantastic news, of course, but it begs the question, which is better: the original cast speaking a language they may not be too familiar with, or a different cast who have the linguistic background to make everything sound as it should?
I don’t have any answers, naturally. What I do have is limited experience. Specifically with Ghibli movies. In recent years, as Studio Ghibli has gained more and more international prominence, the temptation has been for Disney or other studios to step in and provide a dub featuring big-name stars3. And maybe that’s a bad example because animated movies have their own issues with dub vs. sub. But it doesn’t change the fact that it’s better, for me, to listen to the original language and read the subtitles rather than wince every time someone stumbles through what is meant to be fluent English4.
So I’m intrigued and heartened to see that movies like Fancy Dance and The Heart Stays and Native American made films in general are getting a lot more attention. I hope that this question of whether to dub with a new cast or the original cast becomes a moot point as we see more films made with native language dialogue that can be dubbed, naturally and easily, by the original actors, no alternate cast needed.
It’s a word. I, a fluent English speaker, used it intentionally and thus, by definition, it is a word. Suck it pedants.
You know, a lesson in what not to do.
Princess Mononoke featuring Claire Danes for one.
To be clear, I mean when an actor who doesn’t really speak English is tasked with dubbing their own character’s words into English.