Just how smart is Stephenson, anyway?

I am currently reading Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. It's taking me a while, because although I plow through it at a respectable speed when I've got it opened in front of me, for the most part I only read it when I'm a) on the train or b) in "my office".

It's a great read so far, and I dig the attention to detail. But.

Possible Cryptonomicon errata

1. Actually, while the next two are only possibly errata, this is undeniably one. At the same time, it's relatively unimportant, since it's basically just a slip in copy editing. On p.87 (paperback ed.), Stephenson shows the last frame of Lawrence Waterhouse's work as he decrypts Commander Schoen's introductory coded message. So far, Waterhouse has filled in the letters A, C, E, K and T. (A and E from a simple frequency count; C, K and T are added from figuring out the initial word ATTACK.) Problem is, also listed is one letter R--not only has Waterhouse yet to do any work on the R, but it is only one R out of 4, the message being ATTACK PEARL HARBOR DECEMBER SEVEN.

The next two are a little more ambiguous, but potentially much more serious, because they may point to blindspots in Stephenson's cultural knowledge--which (given the genre--difficult to name--post-Gibsonian cosmopolitan techno-fiction?) really should be nearing perfection--or at least be close enough to perfection to fool your average English-as-a-first-language Asian-Canadian who was raised in small-town Alberta ferchrissakes.

2. On p. 262 Randy Waterhouse meets a man who hands him a card which identifies the latter individual as "Goto Furudenendu", "Furudenendu" being the Japanese adaptation of "Ferdinand." But I can't for the life of me see how "Ferdinand" could possibly be rendered as "Furudenendu".

I may be missing something: the Japanese adaptation of foreign words depends on a number of parameters which escape easy articulation (as I belatedly discovered when working on a computational linguistics group project that dealt with just this problem). But, try as I might, I cannot fiddle with these parameters in any way that will produce the adaptation "Furudenendu". The closest I can get is "Furudenendo"--this assumes that the name is originally pronounced in Anglicized fashion, and then is adapted in a way that maximally conserves traditional Japanese phonology. Under any such traditional scheme, however, it will be simply impossible to produce the "du" at the end, since there is no such mora in traditional Japanese--unless you count the kana character that is occasionally romanized as "du" but is actually pronounced as "zu", which is a rather poor rendering of a "d" sound. In fact, that "du" at the end is a real sticking point; although it's possible to produce it in modern Japanese, I see no reason why anyone would, since "do" is the standard and perfectly serviceable adaptation of final "d" sounds.

Not an open-and-shut case, but things look awfully sketchy.

3. On p. 386, we are introduced to Howard Li, who is described as, "Founder of Harvard Computer Company, a medium-sized PC clone manufacturer in Taiwan." Soon thereafter, on p. 388, we see Li gesture to an aide, who comes forth, and then:

"Something something Ordo," Li says in Cantonese.

Eh? If Li is Taiwanese, then his native dialect is almost certainly Mandarin, not Cantonese. He should be speaking Mandarin. Of course, maybe the aide is from Hong Kong or some such, in which case he would speak Cantonese--but then why would the boss change his linguistic habits to accommodate his underling? That would be completely backwards, particularly since the boss really is Boss in the Chinese business world (at least, such is my impression).

Alternatively, maybe Li's native dialect is Cantonese. We are not told that he is Taiwanese, after all, only that he runs a company in Taiwan. He could be from Hong Kong, for all we know (see above). But then one would expect him to speak Cantonese all the time; and one would expect his entire entourage to speak Cantonese all the time (see above); and so one would expect Avi to notice this fact, and, as such, provide a Cantonese rendering of the Mandarin "mì fú" (well, I'm pretty sure it's Mandarin), which he utters on p. 408 at the meeting attended by (among others) Li and his group.

Again, I can't be certain this is a genuine problem, but I have trouble making sense of this.