There are two answers really: (1) It’s a word that has been Englishized from the original Japanese words, as explained below; (2) It is the word that people will use when referring to the original manga, published in Japan. This web page explains both.
Taking number two first, Gunnm is the English word that we use for the original name of the Battle Angel Alita manga when it was first published in Japan in 1991. Many fans of Battle Angel Alita realize that Gunnm is synonomous with Battle Angel Alita and dont know why. It’s simply that the original manga was entitled Gunnm. It was called Battle Angel Alita when it was translated and published in the United States.
But now on to the REAL question that people are asking when they ask “What is Gunnm?” What people really want to know is what does Gunnm mean.
The short answer: It means ‘gun dream.’
The long answer: There is no such word as ‘Gunnm’ in Japanese. So what gives?
In the Japanese way of writing, there are three systems or alphabets that are used: katakana, hiragana, and kanji, with kanji being, by far, the oldest, and most difficult. It derives from Chinese and the characters can represent entire words and even concepts.
At left you see two kanji characters. The first, the one on the left, stands for gun and is the Japanese word “gan.” The second kanji, on the right, is the Japanese word “yume”, which means dream. Hence, Gan Yume (pronounced ‘gahn yoomay’) is Gun Dream.
But wait, Gan Yume is not Gunnm.
When reading kanji characters together, their pronunciations can change — actually even when reading them alone they can have different sounds (I said it was difficult). What matters for our purposes here is that the kanji, when viewed together, are no longer pronounced Gan Yume, they are pronounced Gan Mu (or ‘gahn moo’). OK, so the kanji for the original manga read Gan Mu or, literally, Gun Dream.
It’s still not Gunnm!
Gunnm is the English transliteration of Gan Mu. In other words, Gunnm sounds more like the English word “gun” while still sounding a bit like the Japanese pronunciation of gahn-mu.
So there you have it — Gunnm is how English translators have interpreted Gan Mu, which translates literally as “gun dream”, the original title of the Battle Angel Alita manga in Japan.
Finally, as a bit of language trivia, isn’t it interesting that the Japanese word for gun (‘gan’) should sound so much like the English? Not really, because the Japanese language has had to accommodate words from outside its culture for at least a couple hundred years now — and guns were definitely a foreign introduction.
