Aeris or Aerith

[silentenigma]

Successful communication is only then existant when the communication partner understands the intention and follows exactly what was intended.

This is precisely what, according to my post, "Aerith" fails to accomplish.

It is is Aerith. The manual says it.

Not my manual, that's for sure...

Edit: Oh, you're talking about the Japanese manual. Honestly, they're lucky Barret didn't come out as Ballett in that thing. Guess I'll go read the rest of the thread...

The game says it.

(Edited) The game's innards? It's written a half dozen different ways in there...like the debug room. I'm pretty sure the creative heads were not the ones doing most of the coding.

The files of several official pictures for the pc version says it. Therefore what follows what Square wanted is the most authentic translation.

This kind of stuff was also all over the place back in the day, perhaps sparking the early Internet buzz you mentioned. But I'll bet that, for every person who concluded at that time that it was mistranslated, there was another who stood ground with the official release...because at the end of the day, Square was silent on the matter.

And no, "ri" is not by the same logic the best attempt to reproduce an "r" because in most cases for that they take "ru".

The guy didn't have a TH, so he used SU. He didn't have an -R, so he used R* and picked his favorite variant. So if we consider mapping SU back to TH, then we need to consider mapping RI to R.

By your logic, when Sephiroth is right, they would have to automatically and without a doubt write him as "Sefirotto" because Americans do not use the authentic Hebrew pronounciation either, but no, he was written as "Sefirosu" because the intention made him the English pronounced Sephiroth.

Unless I misunderstand you, my post states why Sephiroth and Cloud are totally different cases - or different "intentions" - from Earisu: They were derived directly from real English words (or English transliterations of Hebrew). Earisu, on the other hand, was primarily a Japanese construction loosely inspired by the letters that make up the word "Earth". There's a difference. And it was almost certainly not written with any final Romanization already in mind:

Tetsuya Nomura had to name his Organization XIII with the Western names in mind for his little name game to work.

Maybe we should go with his early Romanization then, "Earith". Do we even know who came up with the name in the first place? (Nomura wasn't even the first one to draw concepts for Earisu.)

What people do not want to accept, is that Aerith always existed and was not a retcon as no true state was rewritten but just a mistake corrected.

We don't buy your assertion because not only is there a lack of satisfactory evidence for it, there is evidence for the contrary as well.

If I want to say something and someone does not understand what I said I also say "sorry, that was meant differently".

Where was the statement from Square on this matter in 1998? Because if they cared as much as you said, and if "Aeris" was a problem, then they could have ended it right there. Heck, they had several chances, demo releases and re-releases, to get it right. This all looks like a case of someone changing their mind. Or someone else deciding for himself later on that a mistake had been made.

I really don't think this whole thing is as cut-and-dry as you've made it out to be, and while I usually don't like responding to posts point by point, I hope this post shows why my camp has ongoing skepticism about the change.

Edit #3: I actually just finished reading the rest of this thread, and it is hilarious. I absolutely regret posting a serious response.