Marc Miyake over at Abode of Amritas has a post that goes into obsessive detail (just what I like) about the history and connections of the four characters that make up the Chinese name, Yingxiong shidai, of the forthcoming comic The Age of Heroes. He seems to have been set off by the fact that the first word, yingxiong ‘hero,’ uses the same two characters as his Japanese given name, Hideo. If you have any interest in seeing how characters are constructed and how Chinese syllables are represented in various languages (eg, the first one, ying, is Japanese ei, Korean yong, and Vietnamese anh), hie thee hence, but be prepared to concentrate—there’s a lot of ground to cover, including painstaking etymologies: “it took many steps for OC *w@ng to become Mandarin xiong (pron. ‘shyung’): *w@ng > *wung > *Hwung > *Hyung > *hyung > shyung (= xiong).”
It’s the (just what I like) that made me laugh out loud.