[Hero]

I looked around to see what the kanji for "Great Talent" and "Godsend" were, and I was able to find the following:

"Great Talent" (or talent):
http://www.manythings.org/kanji/d/624d.htm
http://kanji.sapp.org/cgi-bin/kinfo?oneill=0574

"Godsend":
http://www.manythings.org/kanji/d/4e0e.htm
http://kanji.sapp.org/cgi-bin/kinfo?oneill=983


The links at manythings helped with the definitions of the kanji, but I liked the "ON reading" given at the kanji.sapp.org site, which shows "Great Talent" is "SAI", and "Godsend" is "YO" (the thumbnail's clickable):


So would the kanji separately be pronounced something like "Sigh Yo", or can it be written as Saiyo or Sai Yo? Then the HEROES symbol could have the name "Saiyo" or "Sai Yo". Or if it makes more sense to say that "God has sent Great Talent", would "Yosai" or "Yo Sai" be a better name? If you are familiar with kanji and how it is written or pronounced or read, could you tell me if any of this makes sense, or if not, show me how to make it understandable? Thanks!

Also, how creative are you? Can you show how to "combine" SAI and YO to create the symbol from HEROES?

[Sam]

Someone has way too much time on their hands. Just kidding.

[The_Heroic_Loser]

Maybe it's just me, but I can't really see how those two symbols combine to form the "S" symbol.

[ford prefect]

i can. But i am an idiot with photoshop. Try to make one symbol one colour and the other symbol another colour and lay them over top of each other. Baseballer should be able to do that.

[Hero]

Well, I got to re-watch the episode, and this time I listened to what Ando said, instead of looking at the captions. And fortunately, I guessed correctly on the kanji based on the meanings! Ando does say "Sai" (pronounced pretty much like "Sigh") for "Great Talent", and "Yo" for "Godsend". So do ya think "Sai Yo" should be the name for the HEROES symbol?

Even though you don't get to hear what Ando says during the scene with just screencaps, here are two screencaps, one dealing with "Takezo Kensai", and the other talking about the Symbol on the sword (again, the thumbnails are clickable):

("Takezo" is a snipped url for the pic)
(or "SaiYoSymbol" for a sorta shorter redirect link)

[randomfactor]

Originally Posted by Hero

Also, how creative are you? Can you show how to "combine" SAI and YO to create the symbol from HEROES?

I think if you take the horizontal strokes from the bottom character combined w/the vertical stroke of the top character, it is very close.

[tobnameless]

On a different note Kensai means sword master, but I haven't found a good definition for Takezo perhaps it is a name? Both of those words come up most often in conjunction with the first named Samuri with the name of Matsusashi (pretty sure I spelled that wrong)

[Mathsorcerer]

Takezo is simply a name, or at least a clan name.

What we need here would be an Oriental symbologist. Anyone with lots of esoteric knowledge hanging around the board? I mean...besides me?

Combining symbols won't be a literal superimposition, but the combination of the two symbols is fairly obvious.

[Pimpalicious316]

here we go:

taking just the horizontal from the second (red) and vertical from the first (blue), we get:


now, my own little method. i rotated the second one 180 degrees and overlayed it with the first. i grayed out the areas that are "extra" in it:

[ford prefect]

thats what i am talking about!
Right on!