Japanese as a language has a couple of cases of what, for lack of a better term, one could call "grammar puns". One of those is "Yo!"

yo is a particle, and as a sentence terminator it indicates emphasis. Just as "ka" as a sentence terminator is the verbal equivalent of a question mark, "yo" as a terminator is the verbal equivalent of an exclamation point.

Japanese allows you to leave out sentence parts which can be deduced from context, so when someone calls you by name and you respond "Yo!" it means the entire reply was omitted, leaving behind only the emphasis.

Or at least that's what I think is going on. Am I right about that?

The other case I noticed recently, which I'm also not quite sure about, is in the first episode of Kirameki Project. Kana is skipping school in order to work on her robots (which is something she does quite a lot) and Rincle is nagging her about it (which is something she does a lot). Rincle starts grumbling, and says, "Kana-sama, tara!"

Kana is one of the three princesses of Genes, so the -sama honorific is appropriate. "tara" isn't a word, so what did Rincle mean?

It occurred to me that "-tara" is the verb conjugation ending for the provisional tense. So Rincle is grumbling about how things might come out, without specifying either a subject or an actual verb to make more specific just what she's grumbling about.

Does that make sense?

As such, I think she's rather abusing the "you can leave things out" aspect of the language by taking it to ridiculous extremes. It's possible that like "Yo!" this is something in moderately common use, but I bet it was intended to be witty the first time someone did it.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Japanese at 12:42 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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