note: yukkuri always add "-san" (honorifix, mostly translated as "mister-" or "-miss") to the end of nouns. usually this isn't a problem, until they start playing shiritori. as a rule of the game, since no Japanese word begins with "n", the person who comes up with a word ending with it (thus leaving the next player in a dead stuck position) will be treated as the losing party by default.
hence with their habit of adding "-san" to every possible noun, normally yukkuris will be the automatic losers in games of shiritori. but here anon decided to roll along and created a bunch of words that are either non-existent, or merely are normal words with "n" added to the front.
say, if we ever decide to translate this comic strip, how would we deal with it then? directly translating the speech into English and leaving notes explaining the Japanese word connection, or make up English words of our own like in the pool Onii-san Switch?
Not quite the proper response for this type of pic, i would think...
That being said, thanks for the explanation Tosyl. Too bad playing with words and then translating them to another language tends to kill the play on words.
Considering that the rules of shiritori don't make any sense in any language that is not japanese (figuratively speaking, there are probably some where they apply), I think this page can't be translated following the original intent Maybe we could change shiritori in the rhyming game, but then we'd have to change every dialogue relative to the game in a way that the joke is still kept, that is, have Reimu say unrhymable (is this a word?) words and then Mister somehow make up something that rhymes It's probably possible, but it would still require significant effort from the native english speakers (unless one of them is secretly a poet or a linguist...)
For those that don't know why shiritori doesn't work in other languages, here's an explanation: To play shiritori one has to say a word that begins with the ending part of the previous word, which was said by the other player Whoever can't think of any word is the loser The japanese language is structured around syllabes, rather than single sounds like indo-european languages, so the "ending part" of a word is the last syllabe, which becomes the first syllabe of the next word, and so on The exception to this structure is the syllabe "ん", which is just a single sound, N As TosylChloride said, there are no words in japanese that begins with ん, so any word ending in ん would make the next player a loser automatically In english (or german, or italian, or...) this wouldn't be a problem, since every word begins with a single sound, thus making every "ending part" a possible beginning of a word This comic revolves around the ん sound, so it can't be translated as-is I apologize for the lenght of this explanation, but I was running out of time and couldn't make it shorter