Dan asks what the Japanese means on this poster (lower right corner). It includes both Japanese and English versions, but Dan suspects the translation isn't very exact and wonders what it really says.
I have an intuition that ã—ã‹ã£ã¦ã„ã‚‹ shikatteiru means "is futile" or implies something along those lines, but I'm probably wrong.
I can't figure out why boi at the beginning is in katakana. I also can't find it in the dictionary. I'm thinking that boi is a slang term for a cigarette butt, which is why it's followed by æ¨ã¦ "discard, throw away" (and also why there's nothing else in the entire poster that refers to tobacco). If so, then the first sentence would be "cigarette butt discarding inhibition poster (some implied verb)".
The impression I get is that what the thing is really saying is, "A poster forbidding littering with cigarette butts is like a child punishing an adult by striking with a paintbrush." Which is a rather peculiar simile, and an even stranger thing to put on a poster of this kind.
UPDATE: shikatteiru is driving me nuts. Given that shika means "nothing but" I wonder if this really means "is no better than" or "is no more effective than".
Use of ga instead of wa after kodomo changes the emphasis. Updated guess: "A poster forbidding littering with cigarette butts: It's as useless as an adult being spanked with a paintbrush by a child."
1
ãƒã‚¤æ¨ã¦ = littering ("especially things like cigarette butts"), X + ç¦æ¢ = "X is forbidden", the "de" is with, shikatte-iru is present progressive tense of shikaru, to scold.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at June 07, 2008 06:57 PM (2XtN5)
A highlight of being a tourist in Japan is the engrish signs everywhere (I recon you could make good money just buy offering to correct the grammar on resturant menus)
My favourite when I was there was the sign on a toliet paper vending machine at a shrine, which read 'Because I do not have a tissue always ready in thsi restroom, please buy a used one'
Andy
Posted by: Andy Janes at June 08, 2008 03:29 AM (fnXpS)
I need help with a word. I have heard it a couple of times now in Tenchi Muyo: GXP and it sounds to me like anshisute, and as pronounced the "u" is dropped. That's obviously the imperative form of some verb. The first time they translated it as "don't worry" and the second time as "relax". What is the infinitive form of the verb they're talking about?
I figured out that 安心 anshin means "relief, peace of mind" but it's a noun. What is the verb they're using?
Actually, I think I'm wrong about it being an imperative. Looks like a gerund, except that it should be -shite instead of -shisute. Probably what I'm hearing is an idiom. Anyone have any idea what it is?
UPDATE: When Neige gets serious, she really scares me.
She play-acts the loli most of the time, so it's easy to underestimate her.
When she drops the act, you see the court lady, the miko who ruled a theocracy for more than two thousand years, and did a superb job of it. Such a person must be highly intelligent, very sophisticated and knowledgeable, and extremely devious, a formidable political chess grandmaster.
Seto toys with the other four, but never tries to play her mind-games with Neige. I think that's because Neige would, figuratively speaking, have Seto in a hammerlock almost immediately if Seto were stupid enough to take her on.
I doubt Seto is even half as old as Neige.
I wonder if what I was hearing was a regional accent, then, or pronunciation drift. The "n-sh" definitely had drifted to become an "s", but that's the kind of thing that can happen. (The English analogy is the way that "going to" has become "gonna".)
So while I've got your attention, I've heard another one. Sounds to me like wauri and they translate it as "sorry". I just now heard it in TM:GXP and I've also heard it in DBZ.
5
That appears to be directly taken from Chinese. The first character
"an" is used to indicate peace, contentment, safety, or the like. The
second character "xin" indicates the heart. Thus, AnXin (pronounced
ann-sheen) would translate directly as "peaceful heart". Babelfish
translates it as "relieved" -- But my Oxford Chinese dictionary says it
means "feel at east" or "set one's mind at rest".
I often find
very close affinity between Japanese written characters (the Kanji, i
mean) and the Chinese definitions, even though the pronunciation
usually differs. Which makes sense, I guess. This one seems to be
directly transferred, characters, meaning, and pronunciation.
Interesting.
Posted by: dkallen99 at June 01, 2008 04:37 PM (v7cLT)
Sometimes the Chinese meaning of the kanji is a big hint. Probably more often than not, in fact.
But it's not uncommon at all for kanji to be used strictly phonetically, without regard for the Chinese meaning. That's pretty much the rule in names, but it happens in other places, too.
My favorite example of that is 馬鹿野郎
馬 ba horse 鹿 ka deer 野 ya civilian life 郎 rou son
The whole is baka yarou which means "stupid scoundrel". In practical use it's just a stronger form of baka, the all purpose insult. It's apparent that it has little or nothing to do with the literal meaning of the kanji. They've been used phonetically.
I don't have any examples to hand, but when I'm scrounging in the dictionary I commonly come across cases where the same word, with the same meaning, can be spelled more than one way, using different kanji. The kanji in question are not close in meaning, and it's apparent that these are cases of homonyms where a standard spelling hasn't been nailed down. In those cases, too, the kanji are being used phonetically rather than for meaning.
As to anshin 安心 it's a noun. (If Babelfish made it "relieved" then it's blown the part of speech, because "relieved" is a participle.) One meaning of it does refer to Buddhism, but that one is pronounced anjin rather than anshin.
Also, language is a living thing. Words change in meaning over time. The kanji used in Japanese were borrowed from China a long time ago, several centuries. There was a long period of mutual contempt in which there was not much cultural cross-mixing, and during that time some kanji in Japan drifted in meaning, in some cases by quite a lot.
So even in some cases where a kanji is used for meaning, it still doesn't mean what the Chinese would think it meant.
One of the running jokes in Shingu is that someone is told to do something, and they respond "hai hai" and get told "One hai is enough."
Usually it's Nayuta saying that, but just now I heard Hikari say it, and I think I know why they like the joke. It's not just that it's a bit rude, but also that the phrase is a nice one to say. (In case anyone's interested, it's DVD 4, title 1, time offset 08:06.)
I'm pretty sure what she says is hai wa ii kai and in practice, with a bit of sloppy pronunciation, wa ii becomes a diphthong, so it all rhymes, nearly. The cadence on wa ii is just slightly different, of course.
Most of that I understand. (Which is a bit terrifying, you know?) But I'm not sure which kai they're using. It doesn't seem likely that it's 回 (the counter for occurrences) but it's not impossible.
But if it's not that, then all it really could be is ç”²æ– which means "effect / result / worth / use / avail" and I think that's what it is. So what this means is "'hai' yields good result". Part of the problem is that the verb is implied. The 'hai' by implication is contrasted to 'hai hai'; there's no explicit "one" in the sentence.
3
Ah yes. I heard it again, this time in Nayuta's execution and it's "hai ha ikkai", so -kai is a counter like you said. "ikkai" means "once". I don't know why or what Hikaru was trying to do by moulding it like that.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at April 29, 2008 10:10 PM (qNSKg)
I think it's possible that Hikari has a heavy accent. A bunch of the characters in that show have Tokoku-ben, I finally figured out. (Harumi's is so thick you can cut it with a knife.)
I'm wondering if Hikari has an Osaka ben, given that the character is mostly played for laughs? If so, some altered pronunciations are to be expected.
The ha you're hearing from Nayuta; is that another form of the topic particle?
Now that you mention it, I can believe that the last part of what I heard from Hikari was ikkai. It's often hard for me to pick out glottal stops.
5
I meant "hai wa ikkai", just used to use ha as written. Nayuta uses it twice in quick succession, BTW. The second time is when she brought drum and other paraphernalia from home. Hikaru is just clowning and trying for a pun which I cannot hear, I'm sure. Nayuta just said as it is, both times.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at April 29, 2008 10:46 PM (qNSKg)
It's written in kana as ã¯ã„ã¯ã„ã£ã‹ã„, so I guess they could be making a gag of the fact that at a glance, it looks like "haihaikkai" (until you realise that the second 㯠is a "wa" particle). If the show was geared towards a younger age bracket (where they're not yet writing stuff liek this in kanji), they would probably get a kick out of just such a joke.
Counters are up there with run-on nominalization in the category of things that make the Japanese language a PITA to learn.
Posted by: Will at April 30, 2008 07:51 AM (WnBa/)
There are phrases in Japanese that I hear again and again and I get frustrated trying to look them up because I can't figure out how to parse the word boundaries.
I finally figured out mada ashita just now. In use it means "See you tomorrow" and I finally figured out that ashita is "tomorrow" and mada is "more, again".
A couple of related ones that I've finally realized are used constantly that I can't figure out how to parse sound to me like soyukoto and doyukoto. I have something of a suspicion that the core of it is koto "thing, fact, matter, reason". But I'm far from sure of that and I can't parse the rest of it. It's been driving me nuts. Anyone care to help me out with this?
Whatever they are, those phrases are very versatile, meaning variously "What have we got here?" or "That's the way it is" or "Is that so?" or "What the hell is that?" or a lot of other things. It can be snide, or reaffirming, or an expression of disbelief, or an expression of agreement. Sometimes there's a da after it, which of course is the copula.
Can't parse "soyukoto", but it does basically mean "that's how it is."
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at March 14, 2008 02:20 PM (LMDdY)
2
See, I told you I was having trouble parsing things. One of my problems is filtering out regional accents, and I think that's why I was just fooled by "mata ashita".
3
"Mata ashita" (also heard: "mata nee", "jaa, mata", etc). "Sou iu koto" is literally "a thing which is called in that way" = "that sort of thing". In addition to the "dou..." = "...in what way" version, you might also hear "kou..." = "... in this way".
-j
Posted by: J Greely at March 14, 2008 02:44 PM (9Nz6c)
4
Most likely it's dou yu koto -- what do you mean?
dou -- question word ~ "how"
yu -- same is "ii", to say
koto -- intangible thing (which is being said)
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at March 14, 2008 03:05 PM (qNSKg)
6
"iu" is sometimes romanized "yuu" because it's one of those corner cases where Japanese isn't 100% phonetic. In writing, you'll usually see ...ã¨è¨€ã† when it refers to an actual quote and ...ã¨ã„ㆠwhen it's the looser "call something" meaning, but that gets lost completely when you romanize.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at March 15, 2008 05:49 PM (AFVZ1)
There's a word I keep hearing in DBZ. And the other night when I rewatched some of the battles with Valkyrie Ghost (in UFO Princess Valkyrie 2) I heard it once there, too.
It sounds to me like kurae and they shout it when tossing a big energy blast at someone. It's always translated as "Take this!" I presume it's the imperative of some verb, but I can't figure out what. Anyone have any idea what it is?
Brian writes about a Hanzi myth: the Chinese do not use the same symbol for "crisis" and "opportunity". Which reminded me of another: "the Chinese symbol for trouble is two women under one roof."
I'm pretty sure that one's wrong, too, but I decided to do a feeble attempt at testing it. Hanzi is too much for me, but I do have at least a passing familiarity with kanji now and know where some tools are. So I decided to see what I could learn from that.
The kanji for "woman" is 女. It's three strokes. I used Breen's radical search to see what I could find, looking for kanji with 7-9 strokes which included that one.
And I did find an odd one. Let's make it really big:
姦
It's three women. It's pronounced kan (and a lot of other ways) and it means "mischief". It also means "noisy". Isn't that marvelous? For instance:
姦計 kankei means "trick" å§¦ç– kansaku means "scheme" 姦人 kan nin means "villain" 姦智 kanchi means "craftiness" 姦ã—ã„ kashimashi means "noisy, boisterous"
UPDATE: This is a test. This is only a test:
AB
This has been a test of the emergency Pixy broadcasting system. If it had been an actual emergency, you would have been directed to tune your browser to Ambient Irony.
However, Firefox, IE, and Opera all screw up the rendering. Since they have completely different rendering engines, that only leaves one culprit: the font rendering. It's returning the wrong height value.
Safari does its font rendering slightly differently, and it gets it less wrong. Still wrong, though.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at December 14, 2007 10:10 AM (PiXy!)
The HTML should be correct; I set the size on that kanji using the tool in the editing box. I didn't try to create the HTML directly.
I wonder if it would also fail for a Roman letter? I'll try adding an update as a test.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 14, 2007 01:07 PM (+rSRq)
6
That's interesting. It doesn't work for Roman letters either.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 14, 2007 01:10 PM (+rSRq)
7
There's enough "bad" HTML in the page to force browsers into quirks mode. In this case, the SPAN seems to be rendering based on the combination of two percentage-based LINE-HEIGHT tags in #main and .content, while the BLOCKQUOTE uses its own override. I guess they're all emulating a common old broken behavior, where the height of an inline element didn't expand the height of the containing block element.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at December 14, 2007 01:34 PM (9Nz6c)
There's enough "bad" HTML in the page to force browsers into quirks mode.
I was wondering about that, then I realised that Steven is running on the old templates and stylesheets. I did some work to clean things up in the 1.1 release, so I'll try copying that HTML to my blog and see what I get.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at December 14, 2007 04:53 PM (PiXy!)
I'm rewatching Shingu. There are a lot of unusual people in this series, but two stand out in one particular way as being the most unusual.
It's a subtle thing that I noticed a long time ago, but in anime girls and women virtually always have lighter skin than boys and men. Apparently light skin on a woman is considered an element of beauty, or so I've been told. I've heard that skin lightening creams are a common costmetic.
So getting back to Shingu, the two most unusual characters are Weinnul and Isozaki. Weinnul is male, but he's so fair he's nearly albino. His skin is lighter than that of any of the female characters. Isozaki, the PE teacher at the school, has distinctly dark skin by comparison to the majority of the male characters.
They're both foreigners, though. (Ahem)
On a different note, I recently started noticing how many wonderful words Japanese has that are three syllables which can be used alone as complete sentences. ("Three syllables" to the ear of a gaijin, of course; in terms of overt cadence they vary quite a lot.) So I started making a list:
tashkani -- you have a point / naturally / of course sasuga ** yappari -- as I thought shou ga nai -- it can't be helped (resignation) (short for shikatta ga nai) mattaku -- for crying out loud (frustration) yokkatta -- thank goodness (gratitude for good outcome) shimatta -- darn (annoyance) mochiron -- of course (confirmation) wakatta -- I understand yameno -- knock it off (imperative form of yameninaru "to be discontinued") bakana -- that can't be right! (disbelief) urasai! -- shut up! masaka! -- of course not maitta na -- you got me! shikari -- get it together! ganbatte -- Go for it! You can do it! (imperative of ganbaru, to persist) abunai -- watch out!
What got me thinking about this was sasuga. It's a wonderful word, a magnificent word, and one which is a bitch to translate into English. In Card Captor Sakura when someone said "sasuga Sakura-san" they'd translate it as "Nothing less from Sakura". More commonly translators say something like "just what we'd expect from..."
It's such a wonderful word; it's interesting that you have to use a pretty complex phrase in English for it.
Yappari is a closely related concept, in some uses, but there's a difference. When used in those kinds of contexts the main difference is that sasuga means someone is living up to expectations, whereas yappari usually means someone is living down to expectations.
UPDATE: Another one is so da ne which often translates really well as "ain't that the truth."
1
I love finding neat words like that in different languages. My favorite is german- 'Tatsächlich' (taat-ZECH-lish) which loosely translates to 'Well whaddaya know?' or 'Why, so it is!'. I use it all the time.
Posted by: Gothmog at December 05, 2007 01:27 PM (ANvHH)
2
Scriptwriters in Shingu in particular like "atari", which means "correct" when stands alone. I heard it at least twice.
It's too bad that "omigoto" is 4 syllables, eh?
BTW, "yameno", I suspect, was misheard. It should be "yamete" or "yamero". The "yameni naru" is honorific. The normal word is "yameru". Everything is "~ni naru" with your social superiors, they can't fart without naru.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at December 05, 2007 06:14 PM (cFJHG)
3
Ah, yes, the translation nighmare that is "sasuga." I first ran into it twenty years ago on my very first job, "The Legend of Kamui," and it was a wakeup call that manga translation was sometimes going to require thinking until beads of blood popped out on my forehead.
Posted by: Toren at December 05, 2007 07:34 PM (lgKMF)
