Hi,

After published libhinwa, I sometimes got a question about the name of 'hinawa'. Here, I describe it to the persions who are curious.

At first, I split: FireWire = Fire + Wire

(Japanese/Chinese translation in the meaning) -> U+706B[0] + U+7E04[1] (in ISO/IEC 10646)

(Japanese translation in the pronounciation) -> Hi + Nawa

Actually, the meaning of 'Nawa' is near rope. In Japanese history, Hinawa was used to fire musket guns introduced in Sengoku period, so the musket gun is called as Hinawa-ju (Ju means general guns). I think there'is a word in European culture corresponding to the hi-nawa, but I don't know it.

I select this name because in general the name of library (soname) must be unique in a system. In my case, I judged it better to pick up words from non-European language group.

[0] U+706B http://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetUnihanData.pl?codepoint=706b [1] U+7E04 http://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetUnihanData.pl?codepoint=7e04

Regards

Takashi Sakamoto