Re: What does "Ma" mean, from "Ma Gnus"?

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> writes:

> Byung-Hee HWANG "(황병희)" wrote:
>
>>> I am in subway, Seoul. This is evening time.
>>> While reading the Gnus history at Internet,
>>> i have some question. What does "Ma" mean,
>>> from "Ma Gnus"? Also is that Japanese word
>>> or English word or Norwegian word? My head
>>> is swimming with this question. Still there
>>> is no answer in my dictionary, in my
>>> google search.
>>
>> At wikitionary, i saw Magnus' meaning, it is
>> "Great". So "Ma Gnus" is "The Great
>> Gnus!"?!?!
>>
>> Wonderful world!!!
>
> Magnus is "great" (or "big") as well as a very
> common name. I always thought of it as
> Scandinavian in origin as it is very common
> here, but even as I kid I read the Transformers
> comic, and there is an "Ultra Magnus" character
> there so perhaps it is international as
> well (or "by now").
>
> But, "Ma Gnus" may be an unintentional pun as
> the "Ma" is actually the Unicode 0x771F char,
> which is the Han char for "real, actual, true,
> genuine" and the Japanese "Ma" (or "MAKOTO
> MAKOTONI MA", whatever that means). [1]

It's always confused me, because that character is pronounced "zhen" in
Chinese. It's always messed with my head a little bit.