And so, we (my wife and I) are agreed on a name for our upcoming boy:
Ryouma Joseph: 龍馬
(the Kanji are for "Ryouma" if you can see Japanese text in your browser; if not, you might see some funky "garbage" text).
It’s pronounced "Lee-OH’-ma"*… but it shortens nicely to "Leo" to all his future American classmates who might be otherwise inclined to club him down like a baby harp seal for having such an unusual name.
More details on this later… I had a nice post all ready for this, but then my OS got cranky when I switched to Japanese input, and dumped the edit page off into oblivion.
*In Japanese, what we see phoneticized into a letter "R" is actually pronounced closer to an "L", but not exactly like an "L". It is probably closest to the soft, single "r" found in Spanish words like pero.
