Boards›Story, Art, & Sound

Riot, you might need to consider something what I call the "Arabic Meaning"

King Lego·11/22/2018, 2:04:35 PM·92 votes·23,922 views

Hello, my name is King Lego, and i am from Lebanon.

And the one thing i never imagined to happen, is this game to have champions and runes (ESPECIALLY runes. I'll get to that part in the end) with the name that can have an Arabic meaning (like Fizz, and Braum), mainly in the Lebanese part.

To the point, as many of you probably already know (i mean there was a post already), the new champion's name, Neeko, her name literally means "f*ck him". Not only is it just somewhat hilarious but can be an awkward situation (like playing league while family members are nearby, or friends who don't know what league is, or even random strangers). The amount of poker faces will be off the charts and i'm not sure if that will be a good memory or a badly awkward memory.

So i do request you to ah....when you make a name for a champion, rune, item etc, do consider the Arabic language in your precautions. I mean if i'm not mistaken, you happen to struggle to make names that does not have a different meaning in other languages right? Well you seem to forget Arabic on this.

You already made the name for Summon Aery, which literally means "summon my d1ck". I hope i get a red response on this, because even though i find this funny, its negatives might be worse than comedy.

200 Comments

RyzeTheSmurfMage11/22/2018, 2:36:07 PM29 votes

Honestly I'm dying laughing at the meaning of Summon Aery and Neeko

Ozzie Storm11/22/2018, 2:31:01 PM19 votes

Arab here as well and let me tell you, this community gives 0 f*cks when it comes to regional issues and culture differences. Had many resposes that gives the meaning of "it's not in my language then why should i care" and assumptions that i was making my post for the sake of stirring controversy or that i had a hidden goal behind it all, when all i wanted, just like you, was to raise awareness about the issue and suggest a solution.

https://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/general-discussion/5TtrYq2b-people-seem-to-miss-the-point-on-why-the-name-neeko-is-offensive

I tried and it was all in vain (both eu and na servers)

Got told by a moderator? that if i have such an issue with this i could send a ticket or sth. but i doubt that would change anything.

Btw the solution is as simple as changing the name from Neeko to Neko preventing the name from being pronounced with a ي as in نيكو and instead as نَكو thus solving the whole issue.

but i guess that's too much to ask.

Herlgar11/22/2018, 4:06:09 PM13 votes

There are just too many languages to completely avoid this kind of thing.

Fasmodey11/22/2018, 2:13:27 PM13 votes

Regions can change champions' name.

PiggyTheAstro11/22/2018, 2:11:18 PM11 votes

I saw a similar post before, I learned something new about Nunu and Ahri...

Velzard of Koz11/22/2018, 4:49:40 PM7 votes

Summon Aery so I may Neeko

SuffocateMeDaddy11/22/2018, 8:35:41 PM2 votes

Why should they consider arabic? The company that made the game is american, their language is english.

Mogarl11/22/2018, 5:46:25 PM1 votes

Must be a riot if someone recommends Summon Aery Neeko.

On topic, a quick google search shows me why this is an issue that won't be solved easily.

"The Second Edition of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words. To this may be added around 9,500 derivative words included as subentries."

"The largest corpus of modern Chinese words is as listed in the Chinese Hanyucidian (汉语辞典), with 370,000 words derived from 23,000 characters, encompassing loanwords, zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific, and technical terms. Alternative dictionaries have as many as 56,000 - 90,000 characters."

"Actually this is an interesting question for somebody who doesn't know Arabic, in short: You can say that Arabic has (according to different Arabic sources listed at the end) between 90 million words and 500 million words."

While this isn't hardcore research by any means, it would appear that sorting through Arabic to get all the meanings would be like sorting sand by colour. Not saying your language doesn't matter, but is it a big enough speaking group to justify the amount of influence all of its meanings would have on names?