Launched in 2004, long before the militant group was formed in Iraq and Syria, the name Isis actually refers to a goddess in ancient Egyptian religion. The Toyota Isis must be one of the most unfortunate Japanese car names ever. But if you pronounce it as an English native speaker would – “a try,” then it becomes particularly topical to rugby players, especially when parked next to a Mazda Scrum, a small kei-truck from 1989 that is actually a rebadged Suzuki Every. Now what about these two beauts from Daihatsu? The 660cc K-car Atrai, read “A-tray” in Japanese, was a strange name for a microvan. for obvious reasons, the name was changed to Conquest for its North American spec model. So, as it turns out, there’s a large population of the international motoring community that believes “Starion” is a mere mispronunciation of “Stallion.” Unable to use that name in the U.S. For example, "Larry" and "rally" are written in Japanese using the exact same letters. But in the car’s original Japanese TV commercial (check it on YouTube!) back in the early 1990’s, the animated head of a horse appears at the end of the advert with a voice overlay saying “Starion,” which sounds very much like a mispronunciation of “Stallion.” That’s because the Japanese language does not differentiate between R’s and L’s. Mitsubishi says that the name is a contraction of “Star of Orion” and refers to a star and a mythical horse. The Mitsubishi Starion is a name of urban legend. Gloria and Cedric are not names for cars, they are names for grandparents. To help my Japanese colleagues understand I just ask them to think of the two most conservative names they can think of from the 19 th Century and then double it. When a car is named in Japan, I really feel that a carmaker should do all they can to confirm the meaning of the proposed name in different cultures before they settle on it. Based on the same platform, both models went out of production in 2004, but not before they generated thousands of chuckles from English speakers for their out-of-date 19 th century sounding names. The Gloria first surfaced in 1959 while the Cedric came along the following year. Two cars that always raise the eyebrows of friends and colleagues from overseas are the Nissan Gloria and Cedric sedans.
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