I'm rewatching Negima!? (haven't got anything better to do). Kaede has a really odd way of using language.
For one thing she uses -dono for nearly everyone. (Except Negi; she's one of the ones who can't resist the Negi-bozu pun.) She even uses -dono for Fuka and Fumika, her best friends. They call her Kaede-nee, which is a lot more familiar and intimate. But that's not what inspires this post.
I just noticed that Kaede uses de gozaru. Which is really rare. I don't think I've ever heard it before. Or at least didn't recognize it.
Usually if you want to be informal you'd just use desu or da. If you want to be polite you'd use de gozaimasu. Why use de gozaru? It's informal yet seems a bit flowery, almost like an affectation.
Is it a regionalism? Or, like her use of -dono, is it a way of differentiating her from the other characters?
Kaede seems rather more polite, deferential, and caring than you'd ordinarily expect from a ninja anyway. In principle, she is an assassin after all. But in fact it looks like her specialty is stealth and espionage, not so much the killing part.
UPDATE: While I'm on language, there's something I've wanted to get parsed so I could add it to my "next 100" page.
It occurs at the end of ep 7. Sayo says yoroshiku onegaishimasu to Negi. Negi responds kochiokoso or so it sounds to me.
I've got that æ¤æ–¹ kochi means "here" and it can be read as "me". ã“ã koso is an emphasis, loosely meaning "for sure". I think that the "o" is a particle indicating that what precedes it is a verb object. Is that right?
Anyway, loosely what the whole phrase means is "Same here". Right?
3
There was a character in J2 (frozen for 300 years), who uses de gozaru after every sentence.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at April 01, 2009 04:32 PM (/ppBw)
4
I'll need to hear to be sure. Normal form is "kochirakoso" (if you use keigo at least). Informally, various variations are possible, I don't think I heard kochiwokoso, ever. J. may be able to fix this for you.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at April 01, 2009 05:02 PM (/ppBw)
5
Setsuna is
a half bird demon of outcast coloration I kind of doubt she is actually a Samurai caste in ancestry. However, she is trained in the monster killing style that translates, IIRC, as God's Cry School. This is the same style that Motoko uses in Love Hina, by the same mangaka. Setsuna considers herself in debt to Konoka's family and uses the retainer language as a result. I think the Konoe, Konoka's family, are high caste nobility descended from the Imperial family.
As for Kaede, we don't know about her background, and she may be copying old samurai flicks because she wants to talk like a retainer.
Posted by: PatBuckman at April 01, 2009 06:00 PM (h7HNv)
6
Manga Kaede is up with the heavyweights - I'd give her a victory versus anyone in the class except mayyyybe Mana, or Eva, going all-out, and even then it ain't a sure thing. Or Chao, but who can beat Chao?
"de gozaru" is not just anachronistic, it's specifically a samurai's speech pattern. Kenshin uses it in that series, and even then it's still archaic.
So yes, it's purely an affectation. It's not "oh, well, she's a ninja"; she's specifically playing a character. She's not just hiding the ninja part, she's overdoing it so much that it calls attention to it from the other way around.
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at April 01, 2009 07:29 PM (vGfoR)
I thought Ku Fei was supposed to be better than Chao. Way I heard it, the top four fighters in the class were Setsuna (blade), Mana (guns), Ku Fei (empty hand) and Kaede (whose weapon is a kunai). And Chao was fifth after those four.
Kaede uses it like a catch-phrase, ending nearly all her sentences with "de gozaru" or sometimes "de gozai" even when it isn't needed. It's like the way some female characters end nearly all their sentences with "desu wa".
I almost wish I hadn't become sensitized to it. Mostly when I run into characters with that kind of verbal affectation I soon come to find it tiresome and annoying.
9
It may just be a reference to generic samurai entertainment. Kenshin might just be the most well known example ported over here. At least she doesn't go 'oro'. I liked RuroKen, but I read it in translation, so I don't really have much of a clue about irritating vocal mannerisms.
That power ranking was mentioned in the manga, just before
Chao revealed her true power, and busted out the force multipiers. These are quite significant. As this involved plot, this does not neccessarily hold true for the versions you follow. Eva, in full vampire mode would also be a powerhouse, but normally she is purely restricted to skill.
This is significant in of itself. Of course, there have been quite a few power ups since.
As far as current power rankings go, Negi might be the most powerful, at least of the original Mahora group.
Mana has been off screen, and we don't know if she has been getting powerups to match those the rest are getting. Eva seems to have reached a plateau in her power level prior to the start of the series.
Posted by: PatBuckman at April 01, 2009 09:08 PM (h7HNv)
11
Not a reference, strictly speaking. They're both pulling from the same historical speech pattern. I bring up Kenshin because it's probably the most famous show in the US for having that speech pattern, due to a plot element related to it.
With Kenshin, it's a bit of an affectation, but not too much of a stretch; it's wholly inappropriate and weird for Kaede. She does the whole package, too - referring to herself as "sessha" is from the same speech pattern.
It's tough to guesstimate power among the classmates - there's not a lot of head-to-head confrontation involved. Ku Fei and Mana have a match in the tournament, which Ku Fei wins by a hair... but Mana damn near killed her, even armed with nothing but a few rolls of coins, so a real encounter would have gone the other way. (Tourney rules prohibited guns.) ;p
Kaede wasn't in the tourney, but Kotaro was... and Kaede is far enough above Kotaro that she can take him down without breaking a sweat. (Possible beneficiary of chivalry on his part, but still.) That puts Kaede at least as good as Ku Fei, though maybe not as good as Mana full out.
Chao isn't as good as the others, if we're talking physical power, skill, or talent. She just cheats like mad.
She's the antagonist of the tournament arc of the manga, and literally takes on the class (minus Eva), the faculty, and the entire student body. Would have won, too, if taking down Negi didn't present a kill-your-grandfather problem for her...
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at April 01, 2009 09:23 PM (vGfoR)
12
You say that, but that's formal Japanese military speech, right? It's an affectation, but of the "sir yes sir" variety.
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at April 01, 2009 09:25 PM (vGfoR)
13
I dunno about the military. I don't recally anyone in Dai-Guard saying that (including enlisted men and junor officers, e.g. in Sapporo, in command center, etc.). They just speak normally.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at April 01, 2009 09:32 PM (/ppBw)
My usual online dictionary has been AnimeLab. One problem with it is that their database is outdated. (It doesn't include madoushi, for instance.)
J Greely's dictionary is good, and his database does know what madoushi means. But I can't link to search results.
I just learned of a new one called Nihongodict. It's spiffy as hell. It's using the same EDICT database, and results are linkable.
UPDATE: I was wrong about J's dictionary. Looks like I can link to search results. The only real problem is that his search results don't include romaji representations, which is pretty important for illiterates like me.
1
If you select romanized output, the link that's generated includes it as well (or append ";r=on"). I need to update the data soon; it's about two months old now, and there have been some significant updates mentioned on the mailing list.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at March 26, 2009 04:44 PM (02VwI)
3
Phase one of the project was accurately displaying the full contents of JMdict. Phase two was editing with no loss of metadata. Phases three and beyond went on the back-burner when sales picked up at work, and I haven't been back to it since.
The reason I'm not providing the romanized readings all of the time is that I, personally, never want to see them. Input and output should both be cookie-based preferences, and I just haven't gotten around to writing that. Or redoing the Kanjidic lookup to be as faithful to the data as JMdict. Or cleaning up the UI. Or applying the kanji/reading/meaning limitations instead of just displaying them inline (although I do have code for that one...).
-j
Posted by: J Greely at March 26, 2009 06:52 PM (02VwI)
4
Fair enough, and it's your tool and you should design it for your own needs. I'm not criticizing.
5
I think than romaji is the Tool of the Devil. Serious students of Japanese (university level) should be taught the kana before they learn word one of Japanese, or it'll take years for them to get the romanized versions (and attendant mispronounciations) out of their head. But a friend of mine, Marc Miyake, who has taught Japanese in university, tells me it's hard enough to keep students in Asian language classes, and he feels if he did that half the students would leave in the first week. Tough call. I learned to read and write them in three weeks while holding down a full-time job, and I'm a dreadful linguist, no talent at all. But then again I was highly motivated.
Posted by: Toren at March 26, 2009 08:46 PM (Kmb8s)
6
I object to the serious student bend. Kana is easy. It's fun. IMHO it was a mistake for Steven to go romanji route and one of the big reasons he and others do it is the spin of seriouseness some people put on this. Romanji needs to be exterminated from education.
Now I may be biased, because vast majority of Russians hate volapyuk aka latinitsa. It's just offensive and causes a visceral reaction. In the same time I think Japanese are completely cool with romanji. They don't HATE HATE HATE it. Nonetheless I noticed that on IRC, for example, romanji is only used in channels with significant weaboo quotient. Real Japanese use kana (in SJIS sadly; damn cavemen). So the preference is clear.
BTW, I was lucky to study Japanese by a romanji-free curriculum in a local community college. It was fairly painless. We just crammed hiragana in two weeks and were home free to poke at katakana at our own pace. 50 characters is only two times more than English has (Russian has 33 letters). If you can write in English, you can write in kana with equal facility.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at March 26, 2009 09:39 PM (/ppBw)
I'm not a student. I'm a dabbler. I don't have the energy these days to seriously study anything. (I hardly have the energy to get up in the morning.)
The only reason I do romaji (Pete, there's no "n" in it) is because I already know the roman alphabet. I've been picking up hiragana a bit, and there are about five, maybe, of them I now know on sight. But genuinely studying them, and learning them -- well, you might as well assign me a 5 mile run. They're as likely to happen.
8
I agree with Steven, regarding his own case. Clearly, he's just having fun. He has no need to make sure he won't make mistakes in spoken conversation as he works towards passing his orals in his junior year, or as he talks with people in Tokyo. Which is why I said "serious students." I'm always pleased when any anime or manga fan makes an effort to learn something about the language. I really think it increases their enjoyment, as long as they don't get overimpressed with their knowledge. (Pete, "romanji" rather than "romaji" is the sort of classic error that is often caused by...the use of romaji. If you read it in kana you would never make that mistake, as you know. I'm not picking on you; just pointing it out. And it's great your course used kana. Would that more did.)
Posted by: Toren at March 26, 2009 10:13 PM (Kmb8s)
9
In my first-year class (community college night school), we started with 33 students, and were down to 17 by the end of the quarter. Most of them left because they wouldn't put in the time to learn the kana and a few basic kanji. The rest simply discovered that as much as they liked anime, Japanese was the wrong language to take if they just wanted a year of something to meet the UC transfer requirements.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at March 27, 2009 06:52 AM (02VwI)
Peter clears up something I had been confused about:
The letter "w" is also used on the net as shorthand for the Japanese word warau (to laugh), and adding "ww" to a Twitter post is roughly the same as typing "LOL" in English to indicate laughing out loud.
OK, that explains a lot. I wondered what all those w's were for. (I've been seeing them in threes, and got confused by "world wide web".)
So they go by JAXA, which comes from the English phrase Japan Aerospace eXploration Agency. I know that to the Japanese, English seems modern and high-tech, but it still seems a bit strange that the official logo for Japan's space agency is based on a romaji acronym from an English translation of the Japanese name. I wonder how that happened?
In case anyone's interested, this is where JAXA does its launches.
I've been trying to figure out this phrase for a long time, and tonight I bagged it: ii kagen nishiro
I think that's how the word boundaries land. It's written like this: ã„ã„åŠ æ¸›ã«ã—ã‚ and it's the imperative of ii kagen nisuru which means "to quit something one has been engaged in too long". In its imperative form it means is "Knock it off, already!" or "That's quite enough!"
I've heard it in a lot of places, but in particular one of the aliens says it in the third episode of Shingu and it's been bothering me for a long time.
I'm still having trouble parsing the phrase. I know that ii means "good" and I think that åŠ æ¸› kagenmeans "degree, extent" (it has a bunch of meanings). But that's where I get lost, because I can't figure out what nisuru means. (Is it a variant of suru "to do"?)
I'm thinking that the literal meaning (in the imperative form) is something along the lines of "a sufficient amount has been done".
Posted by: J Greely at February 24, 2009 06:28 AM (2XtN5)
2
I wrote all that really late last night, then went to bed. And laying there I realized that it couldn't possible be an imperative; it wouldn't make sense. I also wondered if ni was a particle.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 24, 2009 08:40 AM (+rSRq)
3
And now I look it up, and shiro is indeed an imperative after all. Ah, well...
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 24, 2009 08:43 AM (+rSRq)
4
Lucky Star uses the "ikagen ni shinasai" version right at the start, if I remember right. You can bend it in various ways depending on the level of formality and/or politeness required.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at February 24, 2009 11:45 AM (/ppBw)
It appears to be an idiom. ("a fixed, distinctive, and often colorful expression whose meaning cannot be understood from the combined meanings of its individual words".)
Because it has a verb ending, part of the idiomatic usage is to conjugate the entire phrase as if it were a verb, e.g. forming an imperative by changing the ending to shiro, or in other ways to satisfy the demands of keigo.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 24, 2009 11:55 AM (+rSRq)
I'm rewatching Macademi Wasshoi, because I have in mind to do a TMW about it and I'm preparing my thoughts.
Listening to it, there's a word stem they use, shin it sounds like to me, which they're using to mean "god". For example, at one point they refer to shinkai to makai and it means "the realms of the gods and demons."
makai is perfectly fine; I've run into it before. (That's the name of the place Glenda comes from in Petite Princess Yucie, for example.)
é” ma means "demon". ç•Œ kai means "world"
But I've been burning up the dictionaries tonight and I cannot identify any kanji or any other use of shin that means anything remotely like "god" or "deity" or "angel". The only word I know for that is 神 kami which they aren't using.
Anyone care to give me a hand here? What am I missing?
UPDATE: And no sooner do I post this than I find the answer. shin is one of the pronunciations of 神. How common is it?
So shinkai would be 神界. I wonder why they're using shin exclusively in this instead of kami?
UPDATE: I was wrong. They also use kami in some cases.
1
Maybe there's a subtle difference in connotation? kami having more of a 'spirit of a place or object' element, whereas shin having more of a 'spirit from a different place' element?
Posted by: metaphysician at February 08, 2009 09:57 PM (h4nEy)
2
It's the difference between the on and kun readings - in just about any compound, you'll see shin used instead of kami. When used as a separate word, kami.
Posted by: HC at February 09, 2009 05:21 AM (y9yco)
There's a phrase I've heard a lot of times, and it means something like "You don't suppose?" It's an indication that an unexpected thought just occurred to someone, a surprising idea that might be true. I just ran into it specifically in the third episode of Kirameki Project.
Anyway, to my ear it sounds like moshikashitte but that doesn't seem to be right. I've got that 若㗠moshi means "supposing". And tte is a quote mark, sometimes used rhetorically. It can be translated pretty well as "you say".
In the 7th episode of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, Yuuno transforms into his boy form, and it's the first time Nanoha sees it. She hadn't suspected he was anything except a magical ferret. She gets rather incoherent for a minute, and one of the things she says is "Yuuno-kun tte! Yuuno-kun tte!" That's Yuuno, you say? That's Yuuno, you say?
Anyway, I can't figure out the middle word or the total phrase. None of the dictionary entries for it make any sense to me. (Unless, maybe it's this one: 下賜.)
Help me out here, folks. What is it I'm hearing? I want to add it to my "common phrases" list.
It took me a while to notice that they have hardsubbed some of Raising Heart's lines in Japanese. The English subtitles lay on top of them, so it's easy to miss.
In the second episode there's a point where Raising Heart says "Let's shoot it! Starlight Breaker!" The Japanese subtitle says:
I'm not absolutely certain about the first but I think it's right. I've heard "utte" before in DBZ, and I'm guessing that it's the imperative form of 撃㤠utsu "to attack, to defeat, to destroy". So what she says is "Please attack (with) Starlight Breaker!" But it could be a big tsu, so it would be "utsute", also plausibly the imperative.
She also says "I can be shot." The subtitle is:
æ’ƒã¦ã¾ã™ utemasu
Isn't that the polite present tense of utsu? I don't quite understand what that means in this case, since it isn't an imperative any longer.
I'm wondering if it's "woman's speech", the way a polite woman would imply an imperative to a senior without actually using one. Likewise, I'm guessing that the final -o in the first one is the same as yo except more polite.
How badly did I botch that?
(By the way, it's a good thing Nanoha has been paying attention in her English classes. She doesn't have Japanese subtitles to read!)
UPDATE: Just received this by email:
"Utemasu" is the polite potential of Utsu. The polite simple form of Utsu is Uchimasu.
Hokay. I think I understand that. It means that utemasu means "It is possible to shoot". So "I can be shot" isn't too bad. Of course, a fluent English speaker would have said, "I can do it." But "I can be shot" ain't bad for Engrish.
1
utte is made out of utsu according to normal conjugation rules, the same way iku turns into itte (go), matsu into matte (wait -- very common in anime), etc. The word means "to shoot", like a gun or a bow.
ute-ru is a "can do" form, which is a different rule: it replaces "i" of ~masu stem with "e", then slaps ~ru onto it. The 't' in "ute" is a rudiment of "uchimasu" (it would be "utimasu" in a more regular world), and not ~te like in utte. The result is a grammaticaly a normal ~ru verb, which in its own turn can be conjugated. Therefore "uteru" is a normal form meaning "can hear", "utemasu" is keigo of the same.
Just to fill out the matrix of forms: utta/uchimashita is the past of "I shot" uteta/uteimashita should be the past of "I could shoot" (or is it "I was able to shoot" -- I'm not sure of my English here).
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at January 21, 2009 06:03 PM (/ppBw)
2
Oh those dastardly e-mailers Why did I type it all?
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at January 21, 2009 06:03 PM (/ppBw)
3
Originally I had subtitled those lines as translations of the captions instead of transcription of the Engirsh. Got shot down, oh well...
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at January 21, 2009 06:21 PM (7TgBH)
気を付ã‘ã‚‹ kiwotsukeru is a verb that means "to be careful". In its imperative ("te") form kiwotsukete, it means "Be careful!" or "Take care!"
Is this a word that's been subject to pronunciation drift? In ep 7 of Nanoha, Lindy says it, and she leaves out the "w" sound. As she pronounces it, it's kiotsukete.
UPDATE: And later Nanoha says it the same way. And aha, I see what the problem is. This hiragana ã‚’ used to be pronounced "wo" and now is pronounced "o". It's really rare; doesn't come up much. I'm guessing that the database uses wo in the romanization in order to prevent ambiguity with ãŠ.
1
"Wo" is always said with "w" deafened. It's just the way it is. By the way, did you notice that Konoe of Hanaukyo Maids is actually spelled "ko-no-weh"? It's a very rare kana.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at December 28, 2008 08:12 PM (/ppBw)
2
"Just the way it is" is very common in natural languages. I'm continually surprised by just how regular Japanese is and how little "just the way it is" I keep running into. English is a lot messier.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 28, 2008 08:22 PM (+rSRq)
3
I think that を is a grammatical marker in the idiomatic expression ki-o tsukeru, actually. In that use, を is always pronounce o. Wo is sort of the name of を, like t is called tee, or, in Spanish, ñ is called eñe (if my high school Spanish serves, anyway).
Posted by: Canthros at December 28, 2008 09:04 PM (QF0kY)
4
Easily the strangest such thing in Japanese is the way they write 㯠for the "wa" particle instead of ã‚. Almost certainly there's no good explanation for why.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 28, 2008 09:11 PM (+rSRq)
5
Yeah, one of the things you learn early on when subbing is that occasionally a translator will throw romaji lyrics at you with "wo" instead of "o" or "ha" instead of "wa". Not all translators, er, watch the darned show to tell the difference. ;_;
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at December 28, 2008 10:02 PM (7TgBH)
6
It was trendy a while back to use the "wo" hiragana in names instead of "o". Ka(w)oru from Eva is an early example. It's almost run its course now, though.
Posted by: Toren at December 29, 2008 12:00 AM (3AWyf)
