The name¶
The project is Chikuma, written 千曲.
A thousand songs¶
千 sen is a thousand. 曲 kyoku is a musical track. Together the kanji say a thousand songs -- the five words Steve Jobs used to introduce the iPod in 2001, and the sentence that is the reason the object exists at all. Everything the firmware does is in service of still doing that.
Read as one word instead of two, 千曲 is Chikuma: a river in Nagano, and the city along it, named for the thousand bends the water takes on its way down from the mountains.
Nothing about the name announces itself. It reads as a place, which is the point -- the thousand songs are in there for whoever goes looking, the same way Haiku's name is a joke BeOS was already telling.
The river's other quality is worth keeping too. It takes a long, winding path to get where it is going, and it is still running.
The kanji matters¶
千曲 is the river, the city, and the pun.
筑摩 is Chikuma Shobō, a large Japanese publisher. Same romaji, different characters. Romaji alone collapses the distinction, so anywhere the name is written for a Japanese reader, it is written 千曲.
What the name deliberately does not do¶
No pod suffix. No Apple-derived morpheme. No trademark surface -- unlike most of the names it will
be listed beside. That distance is a choice rather than an accident: this firmware replaces Apple's,
it does not brand itself as an accessory to it. Chikuma is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or
connected to Apple Inc.
Known collisions¶
Recorded so nobody has to rediscover them:
- IJN Chikuma, a Japanese heavy cruiser sunk at Leyte Gulf in 1944. A Japanese reader may land on the warship before the river. Not disqualifying -- the Nagano river is the primary domestic referent -- but it will sit next to the project in search results.
- Chikuma City, the Chikuma River, and Chikuma Shobō above. The bare word will never belong to a firmware project; Chikuma firmware is the searchable form.
Pronunciation¶
CHEE-koo-mah. Three even syllables, no stress worth arguing about.