August 04, 2010

An idiom?

There's something I keep hearing and I'm having a hard time parsing it. It translates as "I know!"

One example of it is in DBK ep 56 at 11:22. Frieza says something that sounds to my untrained ear as wakatteryo. But there isn't any such verb tense AFAIK.

What I'm wondering is if it's wakatte aru and that it's become an idiom and been subject to pronunciation drift. Is that what I'm hearing?

UPDATE: While we're on the subject, there's another one. This appears in DBK 57 at 11:40. It's Trunks and it's translated as "Please excuse me!"

It sounds like shideshimasu. -masu is the polite ending, but I can't figure out the base verb that's being conjugated here. (It could be sudeshimasu that I'm hearing.) It's another idiom, whatever it is; it happens all the time.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Japanese at 08:29 AM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
Post contains 139 words, total size 1 kb.

1 I think it must be "wakatteruyo" which is "wakatte" (-te of wakaru) + "ru" (shortening or "iru") + "yo" (ending).

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at August 04, 2010 08:47 AM (/ppBw)

2 For the second one, perhaps a heavily slurred shitsurei-shimasu?

-j

Posted by: J Greely at August 04, 2010 11:22 AM (2XtN5)

3

Alright, here's a 2MB WMV. Sorry about the aspect ratio; they completely changed the UI of Movie Maker and I can't figure out how to do it right. (The thing that should control the aspect ratio doesn't seem to affect the publish options, for some weird reason, and I can't find an a-la-carte publish choice.)

...no advice, please...

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at August 04, 2010 01:21 PM (+rSRq)

4 Looks like Mr.Greely nailed it, judging by the clip.

Posted by: bkw at August 04, 2010 01:32 PM (34O+x)

5 I could be convinced that what he's saying is shireishimasu. Which would be a shortening of shitsureishimasu kind of like how English "going to" becomes "gonna" or like how shikatta ga nai becomes shouganai.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at August 04, 2010 01:49 PM (+rSRq)

6 Yes, as Pete says, the first one is probably wakatteruyo, a short form of wakatteiru. That -te+iru form is used either for things that are ongoing in the present, or continuing results of things that happened in the past. The Japanese "present" dictionary form is actually more commonly a future tense.

The second is definitely shitsurei shimasu. He actually enunciates every syllable pretty clearly, but because Japanese doesn't really have stress accent (and because of the way the vowels in syllables like tsu and shi are often whispered) a lot of clearly spoken syllables tend to just disappear to the English ear- we look for the cues we're used to, like stress accent, and miss the things that are important in Japanese, like pitch accent and timed syllables (well, mora if you want to nitpick.)

Posted by: tds at August 04, 2010 03:24 PM (0SOgY)

7 Yup, very clearly shitsurei-shimasu, although it comes out closer to "shtsrei".

-j

Posted by: J Greely at August 04, 2010 03:26 PM (2XtN5)

8 To build on tds' point a bit, where wakarimasu means "I understand" (or more pedantically, "X is clear to me"), wakatte-iru means "I already understand" (so stop telling me, okay? I get it!).

-j

Posted by: J Greely at August 04, 2010 05:02 PM (2XtN5)

9 In context, that makes perfect sense.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at August 04, 2010 06:38 PM (+rSRq)

10 Yeah, it's kind of odd that you can say "wakaru/wakarimasu" at all in this sense, but wakaru is kind of odd for reasons that are probably best not gone into here (but that J Greely is referring to in his "pedantic" note, I think.) It would be really odd to say "shiru" to mean "I know [some specific thing]." Odd enough that it would probably be considered an outright mistake- that is almost always "shitteiru."

Posted by: tds at August 05, 2010 06:53 AM (0SOgY)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

Enclose all spoilers in spoiler tags:
      [spoiler]your spoiler here[/spoiler]
Spoilers which are not properly tagged will be ruthlessly deleted on sight.
Also, I hate unsolicited suggestions and advice. (Even when you think you're being funny.)

At Chizumatic, we take pride in being incomplete, incorrect, inconsistent, and unfair. We do all of them deliberately.

How to put links in your comment

Comments are disabled. Post is locked.
9kb generated in CPU 0.0392, elapsed 0.0468 seconds.
20 queries taking 0.0426 seconds, 27 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.