Tag change / alias kyuubee to kyubey

The official CM and art show it as Kyubey, as shown here. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gu5-_UmmHQ4

No, they show it as キュウべぇ. Which romanises to Kyuubee.

It does say "Kyubey", in romaji. It is not a Japanese word and is in katanaka (mostly) so standard romanisation rules do not necessarily apply (unless you are arguing that we should use be using sumisu rather than smith for example).

葉月 said:
No, they show it as キュウべぇ. Which romanises to Kyuubee.

キュウべえ going by the official site (big hiragana え not small). It's not a standard Japanese name so the romanization rules don't apply as wanchan says. The official site is a little inconsistent, though, as the sound clips on the website romanize him "kyubee".

This is pretty clearly a "non-Japanese or outright made-up proper name", but it's not entirely clear to me that "Kyubey" is intended as an "official romanization" as opposed to a "Japan-doesn't-give-a-damn romanization". One more source apart from this lone commercial and I would happily endorse kyuubee->kyubey, but until then, I would just as soon stick to romanization policy and do kyubey->kyuubee; it can always be reversed, should the truth become plain in the future.

Kyubey would be incorrect in any case, since the pronunciation very clearly has a long u. And unlike many other insane names Japan makes up for their characters, this one sounds like an attempt at bullshit Japanese rather than bullshit Western-or-somesuch. Let's start with the fact it's spelt with both hiragana and katakana, which'd be hard to render in Latin alphabet. You could probably do it as KyuBEY, but they didn't, which further shows it's a I-don't-give-a-fuck-but-sweet-Jesus-are-Roman-letters-cool-or-what type of spelling.

I... kind of don't care, actually. I think I spell his name differently depending on the phase of the moon.

But we have kyubey in the CM, kyubee in a filename on the official site, and no other sources yet. We need some merchandise or the like to decide for sure.

I definitely accept it as a bullshit non-Japanese name and so don't automatically feel compelled to adhere to the romanization rules.

As for "it sounds like a long vowel so it has to be kyuu", not necessarily. That's only if we accept it as a Japanese name, which is debatable at best. Not all languages indicate long vowels with doubling, so if it's not Japanese there's no inherent requirement to double it.

As for the mix of scripts, I think we can just disregard that outright for tagging purposes. See also chobits/ちょびっツ.

All that to say, we have a tag in use right now and we're just going to keep it as is until we have something to go on for a change. I'll alias a few variants to it for convenience though.

Would it be incorrect to suggest aliasing Qubee and Qubey to the current tag? The notion popped into my head when I saw post #837886.

Mmm, I can see them being used for something else. Unless they become somewhat common spellings in fandom I'd rather leave them open.

Now that we know his true name (Incubator), I think we should do the alias to Kyubey because intended pronunciation of キュウべぇ is /kjubei/.

Or confuse everyone and alias to "cuba".

Wow, I now have a mental link between Kyu(u)be(y|e) and Cuba Gooding Junior. That really shouldn't be. I finally got around to watching this series tonight so I won't be spoiled anymore.

I'm mostly ambivalent to how we romanize his name, though as point of reference, most dictionaries use 「インキュベーター」 for "incubator" which would suggest kyubee as the name (what we have now, but with a short rather than a long one).

Shinjidude said:
most dictionaries use 「インキュベーター」 for "incubator"

But the kana we have is キュウべぇ, not キュベー. Anyway, Kyubey is what appeared in the CM and I'd like to stick with official source.

I still say official sources should be disregarded freely in favour of internal romanisation consistency unless it can be definitely established to be an (attempted) foreign name. Kyuubee isn't, and moreover it's pronounced with long u in the show, meaning the spelling with uu is correct.

As the others have already said above, I don't agree a made up name should be adherent to our romanization rule (which I like really much, so you know). It is derived from an English word with a goal in mind.

In short, there's no strong argument why we shouldn't use what the source says.

Agreed with rantuyetmai so I'll alias to kyubey. Obviously, we wouldn't want to make up our own tag based on his true name since that would be a spoiler (I know you were kidding though, wanchan).

It seems the alias is broken, there are 64 posts under kyuubee.