Do Not Go Jentle...or Doyou?

[ISW_Kaputnik]

I'm coming rather late to Sailor inks. The two "Jentle" inks I've tried so far, the Doyou (dark brown) and Shigure (deep purple) are making an excellent impression. I've using the Doyou for long enough to rank it as a favorite. It's only my second day with the Shigure, so I want to give it a bit longer before making any final judgments, try it in a variety of pens and see how it goes, but so far it's doing great.

 

But this isn't about how good they are as inks. I'm wondering about the naming of this product line. Of course, this must have come up here before, but when you google something like "Jentle ink spelling site:fountainpennetwork.com", you get an unwieldy number of results. Sailor's own site doesn't seem too helpful on this either. Although I suppose I could Email them.

 

Why Jentle? Is this a deliberate advertising misspelling of Gentle, to make it a trademark? Was it an unintended misspelling, which they then stuck with? Is it a Japanese word? A word in some language other than Japanese or English? An acronym or abbreviation?

 

Or what? Just curious if anyone has the answer.

[wetnoodlepens]

Am curious to know this too. By the way, nice play on words. =)

[swanjun]

I hate to spoil your pun, but Doyou is actually pronounced Do-yo (rhymes with yo-yo). The u on the end represents a very slight elongation of the long O vowel.

 

As for "why Jentle with a J?" I am assuming they're referencing the English word "gentle," but since the letter G is always a hard G in Japanese, they use the J to get it right phonetically.

Edited October 15, 2014 by swanjun

[Joe in Seattle]

And, the moniker is fairly descriptive, as the ink is about as benign as Waterman is, and as well behaved.

[arcadeflow]

I researched about this a couple weeks ago, because "engrish" always bother me. I found out in some dictionaries that "jentle" is and old form of "gentle".

 

http://namestele.com/english/viewJentle.html