On Tue, 15 Nov 2005, Bob Foxworth wrote:
> > Well, Mr. Akio Morita - the founder of Sony - wrote that he wanted to
> > name the company with a variation of Sonus (the latin word for sound)
> > and picked sonny. Later, he found that the word had an english meaning,
> > so he dropped one of the 'n's.
> >
> > From http://www.nndb.com/people/384/000094102/
> >
> > "With Masaru Ibuka he co-founded Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo K.K. in 1946,
> > which changed name to Sony (derived from the Latin word for "sound") in
> > 1958. In order to enhance international sales, at this time the company
> > took the unprecedented move to spell its name in Katakana, the alphabet
> > used in Japan to transliterate foreign words"
>
> Obscure trivia dept:
>
> When you look atr a Sony product and carefully
> examine the four letters that make up the name,
> you can see that the first two "SO" are not exactly
> the same height as the "NY" The difference is
> only a few percent. Without having an example
> handy (doing this from memory) I think the "SO"
> are the taller letters.
>
> I don't know why. Perhaps it is related to the
> katakana explanation as each syllable could be
> in theory rendered by a character. Maybe it was
> a way to trap unwary counterfeiters, with less
> attention to detail than they should have.
Maybe it's a characteristic of typography -- "S" and "O" are curved on top,
"N" and "Y" are pointed. Occam's Razor and all that... Check out "C", "D",
"G", "Q" etc. vs. "A", "H", "J" (if it has no bar in that font), "K", etc.
in your favorite font at high resolution (screen and inkjet aren't high
resolution).
--
-eben ebQenW1@EtaRmpTabYayU.rIr.OcoPm home.tampabay.rr.com/hactar
"God does not play dice" -- Einstein
"Not only does God play dice, he sometimes throws
them where they can't be seen." -- Stephen Hawking
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
This list is provided as an unmoderated internet service by Networked
Knowledge Systems (NKS). Views and opinions expressed in messages
posted are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
official policy or position of NKS or any of its employees.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Fri Aug 01 2014 - 20:05:35 EDT