Nick says: ``The weird characters for strength are actually one *two*
characters. The first (the one that looks like two characters) is "tai,"
meaning body--it looks like two separate characters because it has two components,
the left roughly meaning "person," and the second roughly meaning
"root" (but you can't take meaning too literally here, since sometime
the components are purely arbitrary). The second character is "ryoku,"
meaning force--it's very similar to the character "katana" (I
know you well enough to know I don't have to tell you what that means...
;) ), which might not be a coincidence.''
Tim Soholt says: ``I very rarely have access to a better web browser than
lynx (translation: no image capability), but your description of a character
that looks like the letters `tj' put together sounds like either the katakana
(one of the two phonetic alphabets) `ka' or the kanji (pictogram) pronounced
"chikara" by itself or "ryoku" as a suffix (Japanese
gives English a run for its money in the bizarre exceptions department),
which my Japanese-English/vice-versa dictionary defines as "strength"
or "power." I'd bet that the attributes translate into something
like "physical power," "mental power," "healing
power," and the like.''
Then he says: ``I finally got a few minutes on a graphic web browser and
was able to check out your trasnscriptions of those Japanese GURPS c-sheets.
I didn't have my dictionary with me and my ability to sight-read kanji is
about a half-step above nonexistent, but I was able to glean a few things.
First, the character at the end of the attribute names is definitely either
"ka" or "chikara/ryoku" as I discussed earlier.''
Hunter says: ``Yep, that's Strength, in particular physical strength. The
first character (everything except the 'tj' is the first character -- should
be smooshed together) is pronounced 'ta i' (or like the English word 'tie')
and the second character (which means generic power) is 'ryo ku'.''