Which is harsher, kisama or temee? Linguistically they're both used the same way and have approximately the same meaning: "you, who I despise". I was under the impression that temee was stronger.
But as I think about it, I can remember two cases in anime of girls using temee. One was Suzuka in Macademi Wasshoi, and the other was Vita in Nanoha StrikerS. And I can't think of any case of a girl using kisama.
So I'm beginning to wonder if kisama is actually more harsh. I think the reason I thought it was less so was because it's used so heavily in DBZ by Vegita and Piccolo, and occasionally even by Goku, and those to whom it is addressed don't respond to it.
This isn't the kind of question a dictionary can answer. I need someone familiar with colloquial usage.
1Kisama, definitely. I base this only on watching anime for 15 years, but you can watch a lot of anime in 15 years. Any time someone's really mad they say kisama.
Posted by: atomic_fungus at July 29, 2010 08:50 AM (gLbEB)
3
There are archaic social circumstances where kisama is appropriate for non-insulting use (not that I'm particularly familiar with the details). Thus you'll occasionally get a character who uses it a heck of a lot, not because they're always mad, but because it's a part of their speech affectation.
If I remember correctly, it's omae, omee, temee, then kisama (though omee is mostly girl-punk...)
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at July 29, 2010 09:30 AM (mRjOr)
4
Kyoichi applies "kissama" to Muryou right in the classroom (Shingu, somewhere around ep.23 -- the meeting over the terrible sandwich).
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at July 29, 2010 10:31 AM (/ppBw)
6
But that's just it. It's not that the thug guys are using an unusual term as a form of unusual Japanese; they're using a perfectly normal Japanese term in a perfectly normal Japanese usage, but a lot more often, because they're -thugs-. Nice people don't go around calling others kisama often, not because it's not in their verbal arsenal, but because they're nice people who don't get into those situations.
However, on top of that, it's also used in a form of polite-but-extremely-archaic Japanese, so occasionally someone who shouldn't be using it in the normal-insulting sense will use it a lot. I'm sure I've heard a couple of icily-formal warrior-girl types use it in that sense, but it's been long enough that I can't recall specific examples. Darn brain must be going out on me...
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at July 29, 2010 02:15 PM (pWQz4)
7
I think kisama is definitely worse, but you won't hear either one under normal circumstances- they're both rude enough to be really unacceptable (unlike omae, which is kind of rude, but is used quite a bit in day to day speech.)
But as some other people have noted kisama used to be a respectful form (one story I've heard is that it became insulting due to being used sarcastically by drill sergeants chewing soldiers out, but I have no idea if that's true.) Onore is another one like that- used to be respectful and is now rude. One example of a female character who uses kisama quite a bit because she's speaking archaically rather than because she's trying to be rude is Rukia from Bleach. Threw me a bit when I first saw the show.
In Saki ep 19 at about 11:41, Koromo says something that my various copies all translate as "Woe is me." (I think they all stole that translation from CrunchyRoll.)
I've been wondering what it was she really said. It sounds to me like "ikan ni sen". Could it be éºæ†¾ã«åƒ, meaning "a thousand-fold unsatisfactory"?
1
After tracking the episode down on a Vietnamese Youtube clone, I'd say you heard it correctly, and Google searches for ã„ã‹ã‚“ã«ã›ã‚“ turn up . Several sites explicitly equate it with ikansen 如何ã›ã‚“, which is in Edict as "can't be helped; to one's regret". I believe the correct kanji for sen is é¸ = "selection; choice".
I found an informal dictionary site that had the meaning as 「為ã™ã¹ã手段を躊躇ã„ã€å›°ã£ã¦ã„る様åã€, which I'd roughly translate as "situation where you are hesitating and at a loss about the right thing to do".
-j
Posted by: J Greely at July 11, 2010 06:10 PM (2XtN5)
2
(heh, didn't notice the bad edit that deleted the examples, which were things like "they want what to fix my air conditioner?")
-j
Posted by: J Greely at July 11, 2010 06:16 PM (2XtN5)
3
I can believe "unpleasant choice" given the context. That works for me.
Posted by: J Greely at July 12, 2010 11:53 AM (fpXGN)
5
I don't have Saki ep 19 but yeah, bet it is ikansen. I'd be interested to know the etymology. As it is used these days it should usually be translated as something like "unfortunately" or "regrettably." Anyway, not sure if you mind comments on posts a few days old... ikansen.
Computer keyboards derive from typewriter keyboards, of course. The basic QWERTY layout we now use was created originally for manual typewriters to minimize the number of key jams, by physically separating the letters of common bigrams -- or so the mythology goes. Actually, part of the goal was to slow the typist down.
Regardless, we're still using it even though the original function has long since ceased to matter. (When's the last time you saw someone using an unpowered manual typewriter? When's the last time you even saw such a beast?)
What with Americans inventing all of this, and with English having a relatively small number of characters, it wasn't all that tough to fight them onto a typewriter keyboard. It's more of a problem for some of the European languages, especially in the far north, who have a lot more characters than English.
But for the Japanese, it's really a mess. A manual, unpowered Japanese typewriter bears no resemblance at all to one of ours. It has a tray of type pieces. There's only one key, but it's mobile. What happens is that you move a pointer over the type you want to use and press down. The type is popped up out of the tray, grabbed by a hammer, which swings it up to strike the page. When you release the key, the type is returned to the tray.
The tray contains the whole hiragana set plus maybe 50 or so very common kanji, and if you need a kanji not in the tray, you go to a file cabinet and get the one you need and drop it into an empty spot in your tray. It's an amazing device but it's also run by "hunt and peck" and an experienced typist can maintain a rate of maybe two characters per three seconds, with occasional pauses to visit the cabinet.
None of that makes a lot of sense for a computer data entry device, and what they ended up doing was to adapt American computer keyboards by giving all the keys alternate readings. You can switch the keyboard from romaji mode to hiragana mode.
That strikes me as very complicated. There are 74 characters you need in order to write Hiragana, even ignoring punctuation or any kanji. Fitting all of those onto a keyboard is tough. (I don't know for sure how they do it, but I assume that they're putting two characters per key and using the shift key.)
If we were designing a Japanese keyboard from scratch, without any knowledge of computing equipment history, how would we do it? It occurs to me that what you'd do is to create a double-action keyboard, to take advantage of the regular design of the hiragana set. Your left hand has 12 keys. Your right hand has 14. What are they?
Most characters are created by simultaneously pressing two keys, one with each hand. To get 㙠su you press ㆠu and 㕠sa simultaneously. To get ㈠e you press ㈠with the left hand and ゠with the right.
In other words, the first five keys for the left hand are the leftmost members of the rows of the chart and the keys for the right hand are the top characters of the columns. The left hand also gets single-action keys representing the orphans ん ゃ ゅ ょ 㣠゠を. Those get pressed without any right-hand key.
That's only 26 keys, evenly divided between the hands, which is very manageable. It leaves room on the keyboard for digits, borrowed punctuation marks, and shift keys for getting katakana.
To get kanji, it's the same as now: you enter in hiragana and the word processor substitutes kanji for kana when it can. If it picks wrong, you can put your cursor on the wrong kanji and use function keys to scroll through alternate choices.
IIRC, I seem to recall that the idea of the QWERTY keyboard being intentionally designed to slow down typists is an urban legend too. A lot of the received wisdom about the superiorty of other keyboard arrangements over QWERTY has either outright overstated the difference, were mistaken, or possibly were complete fabrications.
C.T.
Posted by: cxt217 at June 16, 2010 12:15 PM (VwPhI)
2
We used to have a typewriter in our home at least until I was about ten years old. We didn't actually use it, but I loved to just write random stuff with it for fun. I find the sound a typewriter makes absolutely lovely.
Posted by: Jordi Vermeulen at June 16, 2010 12:58 PM (5EMw1)
3
To see how they do it, here's the Japanese keyboard on my Mac. I use the wapuro-romaji input method rather than the direct hiragana input, but it supports both.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at June 16, 2010 01:11 PM (fpXGN)
4(When's the last time you saw someone using an unpowered manual typewriter? When's the last time you even saw such a beast?)
usbtypewriter.com, although I suppose it's stretching a bit on "unpowered".
Posted by: Anachronda at June 16, 2010 01:49 PM (3K4hn)
5
J, I only count 46 hiragana on that keyboard. Looks like they left off all the ones with circles in the upper corner or double ticks. I assume there's a way to add those, with a second keystroke?
6
Yup. If you look at the @ and [ keys, you'll see dotted boxes with the voiced and semi-voiced modifiers in the upper-right corner. Press the base character, then the modifier. You can use CapsLock to type katakana, or just type a string of hiragana and hit Control-K.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at June 16, 2010 02:28 PM (fpXGN)
7
I didn't realize that was what they meant! You'd think I'd have noticed, but I didn't.
8
It seems to me at this point Japanese computers should be abandoning keyboards altogether in favor of handwriting recognition.
Posted by: Eric J at June 17, 2010 09:15 AM (M7n4p)
9
Eric, it's actually working the other way around: an increasing number of Japanese people have been losing the ability to write uncommon kanji reliably, because they spend most of their time typing on computers and cellphones.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at June 17, 2010 10:03 AM (fpXGN)
Speech recognition is a better answer because Japanese pronunciation is much more regular than English. Sure, there are cases of pronunciation drift (e.g. "jutsu" is often pronounced jitsu) and there are regional accents, but that can be handled. In all of those ways Japanese doesn't hold a candle to English, and they pretty much solved those problems for English a long time ago.
11
Average stroke count for the 1,945 "made it through Junior High" set is 10.3, with a max of 23 (é‘‘). Common handwriting-recognition systems accept a number of abbreviations of common components, to improve speed and recognition.
Largest number of strokes in the current Japanese standards is 34, 䯂.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at June 17, 2010 03:12 PM (fpXGN)
12
Or they could just adopt the Latin alphabet. Problem solved.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at June 18, 2010 12:55 AM (PiXy!)
In the first episode of Mai Otome Zwei, at 18:03, Mai has activated her power and some people are cheering for her as "Meister Mai", that being the proper form of address for an Otome.
It seems to be the case that various Otome pick up nicknames. Haruka is known as "Destroyer Armitage". Arika is known as Arinko, which is a cutesy nickname for a cute girl. But she's also known as Meteor Breaker Arika because she single-handedly destroyed an asteroid which was going to devastate Windbloom.
One of the kids calls Mai higeki no meister, which seems to be a nickname that Mai has picked up. And her reaction makes clear that she doesn't like it, but what can she do?
The fansubbers translated that as "the tragic meister". I just looked it up and they missed a great opportunity. Higeki means "tragedy, disaster" and they could have translated that as "the Master of Disaster".
I'm waiting for Bob to get in the new release of Nanoha A's (any day now) and then I'm going to put in an order. I realized recently that Mai Otome Zwei is available in R1 (although only at 480p) so I'll guilt-buy it. I wonder how the official translation handles this nickname?
(It's sad. I already have Nanoha A's, but the Geneon release had fouled up audio on the first few episodes. I'm buying a replacement in hopes that Funimation remastered it and fixed the problem. Also, the Geneon DVDs were pressed badly and my drives have a hard time reading them. I'm also going to be buying Strike Witches which I already bought from Crunchyroll and then later downloaded as a fansub. And I'll buy Mai Otome Zwei which I already have as a 1080p fansub. The only thing I'll be ordering that I haven't seen is Akiballion.)
UPDATE: Speaking of missed opportunities, looks like I screwed up the delivery address on my game order. I got a call from FedEx to ask about it, and at this point I'm betting it won't be delivered until tomorrow.
But I might be lucky. The FedEx tracking site shows the address exception, but the expected delivery date hasn't changed. So maybe I'll still get it today.
UPDATE: No, they didn't deliver it, and I feel like an idiot. I don't know what I was thinking when I entered the address.
I lived in this complex 30 years ago, before I moved to Massachusetts. When I put in the order, I used the house number for the building I lived in 30 years ago, not the one I live in now.
1
Could be worse; at least "the tragic meister" has a passing acquaintance with English. In Pilot Candidate, each of the mechas is run by a two-person team consisting of a pilot and a "repairer". I've often wondered how it is that no one on the dubbing team had heard of a "mechanic".
Posted by: Anachronda at March 25, 2010 06:06 PM (LD+ZJ)
1
Great, now the image I had of SnO as a very funny yet somewhat dumb ecchi series has violated the sanctity of my reality. It had to be Japan. ::sigh::
Posted by: Jaked at March 08, 2010 01:28 PM (EjkUJ)
2
The ED's were the major reason to watch that show. Every one was different, had a different song, and the animation was far superior to what was in the show. I think they spent most of the budget on it -- they definitely didn't spend it on getting a better writer than the original manga-ka to fix things.
I have to say, the flying panties ending was the bomb though. Just the concept alone was good enough, but the execution had me in stitches, from the sheer chutzpah. They're PANTIES! And they're FLYING!.
I've been noticing no yatsu quite a lot. It always follows someone's name. Suga-kun in Saki uses it (e.g. Yuki no yatsu) and for a while I thought it was "man speech".
But Queen Mashiro in Mai Otome Zwei also uses it, "Arika no yatsu". The no is a particle but it doesn't make sense as a possessive. It might be a linking. But I think phrase is an idiom, a phrase which has a meaning other than its literal reading.
奴 yatsu is a less-than-respectful way of referring to a person of either sex. The whole phrase is lightly derogatory, a way of expressing contempt or displeasure or distaste.
So I've been thinking about how you'd translate Arika no yatsu and I think I'd go with "That Arika".
1
I think may be called "appositive". The textbook example is, "hosutofamirii no Suzuki-san" that means "[my] host family, Suzuki-san". So, "onii-chan no baka!" means "idiot big-brother" in the same way.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at February 13, 2010 09:49 PM (/ppBw)
2
That's maybe a bit too nice. As you say, there's definitely the negative implication there. "That damned (darn?) Arika" would work just fine, depending on the character's other speech patterns.
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at February 14, 2010 12:30 PM (mRjOr)
There's a word I keep hearing in some situations which I can't parse. Lafiel uses it at the ends of her sentences several times in the first part of the first episode of Banner of the Stars and Eineus (same seiyuu) uses it once in the first episode of Macademi Wasshoi.
It sounds like ee-oh-ee and I'm wondering if it's ii yo ii which would be translated as "Good! good." That can't be it, though. I can post a video clip if need be, but does anyone have any idea what she's saying?
1
Well, yoi is the same thing as ii. I usually hear it in period pieces, so I thought it was archaic. Usually some figure of authority or other says "sorede yoi". Lemme check the Banner though.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at February 09, 2010 02:40 PM (/ppBw)
2
I think it's just yoi. E.g. Lafiel says "dasu ga yoi" where Pickard would've said "on screen".
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at February 09, 2010 02:53 PM (/ppBw)
3
You could be right. Maybe it's just that Kawasumi emphasizes the "ee" sound at the beginning of "yo".
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 09, 2010 03:10 PM (+rSRq)
Kawasumi uses it as Eineus in Macademi Wasshoi. Eineus is a top-ranked demon. (If you believe Finea, Eineus is the top Vergest, the top demon-beast.) Like all demons, she's also immortal and thus as old as the universe.
So it's not totally out of character for Eineus to talk that way, too.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 09, 2010 04:06 PM (+rSRq)
When she first appears in the series, they toss up this intro frame:
The top line is エーãƒã‚¦ã‚¹ ザ ãƒãƒ¼ã‚¸ãƒ¥ã‚¹ãƒˆ "eeneusu za baajusuto". (I'm not absolutely certain about the ュ.)
There is a standard way of representing the foreign sound "va" in katakana, ヴァ. But I'm not sure how widespread it is. I think it's a pretty recent innovation and it may not have caught on.
You're far more likely to see v- sounds converted to b- sounds, and it looks like the fansubbers assumed that was the case here. This particular group screwed up some other names e.g. Synclavier became "Shinkurado". So it wouldn't be too surprising if they screwed this up, too, as obscure as it is.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 10, 2010 09:31 AM (+rSRq)
1
I can see it being somewhat of a difficulty to control those guys, even if you have a careful gun safety lecture beforehand. I grew up with guns (living as I was in the Canadian wilderness) and had my own single shot .22 by the age of 8, which I used to bring prairie chickens and cottontail rabbits home for dinner. Gun safety was all around me and my occasional carelessness was swiftly corrected. Seeing what a .22LR can do to a rabbit has a sobering effect as well. My wife was interesting in learning to shoot, but somewhat afraid of guns, and certainly had no obsession with them. She was easy to teach, for that reason. I think the problem with some of the Japanese tour groups is they are used to waving their airsoft guns around all the time at home - even shooting each other with them - and are also probably overexcited to be shooting a real gun for the first time. I wonder if it wouldn't be a good idea to get a big ham or roast or something, put a .45 hollowpoint through it while they watch, and then have everyone take a good close look before they get to handle a loaded gun. Manabe (of Outlanders fame) used to travel to China at least once a year to shot things like machine guns and even RPGs. He even paid to fire artillery one year. He said he was going to fire a tank's main gun next time he went but I don't know if he ever did.
Posted by: Toren at October 04, 2009 04:14 PM (9K6fX)
Reminds me of the stories about how Mamoru Oshii (He of the endless monologue repute.) would travel to Guam in no small part because on Guam, you can actually shot firearms.
I suppose if those tour groups of Japanese engineers really wanted to go nuts, they should have gone to the annual firepower demonstration event they hold in Tennessee, which culminate in a massive night-time live fire shoot. On the other hand, the participants are a lot less forgiving on laxness in gun safety...
C.T.
Posted by: cxt217 at October 04, 2009 05:51 PM (mN0UR)
3
Those Japanese tourists sound about as bad as the police cadets I used to run into at the pistol range in Watsonville. They got so excited at their semi-random hits on the paper that they'd walk over to show their friends, completely forgetting about the loaded gun they were pointing at everyone they walked past.
Women, on the other hand, learn faster, shoot better, and rarely forget about safety. I'd rather have ten novice women shooting near me than a single "experienced" male cadet.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at October 04, 2009 05:54 PM (2XtN5)
Now that I've figured out how to extract out useful video snippets, I can begin to pursue questions of certain words and phrases I've heard that drive me nuts.
Two of them today, both from Macademi Wasshoi.The first (4.5 megabytes) is from episode 8. There's a ghost wandering the halls of the Magician's Academy, saying something which gets translated as "Use me. Please use me."
I finally figured out that the key word in there is tsukatte which I think is the imperative of tsukaeru. Problem is that there seem to be two different verbs which are closely related: 仕ãˆã‚‹ which means "to serve, to work for" and 使ãˆã‚‹ which means "to be useful, to be serviceable".
Also, onegai doesn't really quite mean "please" though it's often translated that way. What it really means is "wish" or "request". In the charming Japanese way they have of omitting most of the words in sentence clauses, when used this way then idiomatically it means "It is my wish" or "It is my request".
It has the same effect as saying "please" but there's a subtle difference which I think really matters this time.
It sounds to me like she's saying onegai atashi o tsukatte. The "o" is a particle indicating the object of a verb, so what I think she's really saying is closer to "I want to be useful" rather than "Please use me".
I extracted out a pretty big section because Falche says it once, and the little girl says it twice. (Except that Falche says watashi.)
The second (630 Kbytes) is from episode 3. Falche has just said something about Miyabi (which I didn't include) and Miyabi says something which means "You got that right" more or less. It sounds to me like gomeeto. It bugs me because I keep wanting to hear omedetou and that isn't what she's saying.
Setsuna says exactly the same thing on the beach to someone (I won't say who because it's a spoiler) in the second to last episode of Shingu.
Anyway, in this case I don't have a clue what is being said, and it's driving me nuts.
1
I heard it in Naruto 64 (link with time offset into the right place). It's not in dictionaries and it's intriguing.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at October 01, 2009 09:28 PM (/ppBw)
2
Well, there's "mei" (明), which means "good insight", and thus "go-mei", but that's about as far as I can reach. No clue why -to suffix.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at October 01, 2009 09:37 PM (/ppBw)
3
In the second one it's ã”åç” (gomeitou). The go is an honorific. This might also be a pun, as meitou also means a great or famous sword, and she seems to be swinging a sword. Hard to tell from such a short clip though.
In the first one the verb you're looking for is 使ㆠ(tsukau), which means use.
Posted by: tds at October 01, 2009 11:04 PM (zjX5u)
4
Disagree with the first, I'm afraid. There are other Japanese phrases that can be used for "I want to be useful"; this one implicitly objectifies the speaker. I'd also expect something more elaborate than "onegai" if the speaker was really saying "this is what I wish" rather than "please!"
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at October 01, 2009 11:09 PM (vGfoR)
5
I figured I was wrong (about both) which is why I posted this.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at October 02, 2009 04:00 AM (+rSRq)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at October 02, 2009 04:02 AM (+rSRq)
7
Tsukatte isn't imperative for tsukau; that would be tsukae ("use this!"). Te-form has a lot of different uses, but this one is the common "X-te kudasai" request ("do X for me", literally "give to me your X-ing"), with the kudasai omitted.
[It couldn't have been any of the tsukaeru verbs, because they're intransitive, and in any case would conjugate as tsukaete]
Side note: I was told that as a male, I should never use "onegai" for "please", because it sounds feminine compared to "onegaishimasu". Senko Maynard's Expressive Japanese classifies it as an amae usage, which certainly fits this context.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at October 02, 2009 09:21 AM (2XtN5)
8
Well, you were close on both counts. It's hard to disambiguate verbs like tsukau and tsukaeru unless you've studied the gory (well, they're not actually so bad, but...) details of how verbs conjugate, and I get the sense that you don't have a lot of interest in formally studying Japanese. On the second one you were exactly right except for the long vowel and- well, I think I started with an advantage there since I sight-read music pretty well, and that still occasionally poses problems for me even after having heard a great deal of Japanese.
I'm a bit hesitant to say this, as I don't want to offer you unwanted advice, but since you're spending a lot of time with dictionaries two things are worth keeping in mind. One is that anytime you hear a word that begins with go or o but you can't find it in the dictionary it's likely that the go or o is an honorific, and that the word is listed without it. The other is that the long e sound is usually written ei, not ee. In a two character Chinese compound like this I think that's actually always the case, off the top of my head. Anyway, I hope that's not more advice than you wanted- if so, sorry.
Posted by: tds at October 02, 2009 02:39 PM (zjX5u)
The business of go- being an honorific, plus the fact that gomeitou means "good job" means it's a lot like gokurosan or gokurosama. The suffixes are the honorifics used with people's names, and are represented by the same kanji as those usages. And they both begin with the same kanji ã” as gomeitou does.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at October 02, 2009 05:04 PM (+rSRq)
10
Yes, very similar, particularly as they're all pretty much set phrases. The main difference is that gomeitou has a much stronger connotation of "Good answer", whereas gokurousama has a connotation of having worked hard/well. san and sama get used in a number of ways that seem initially surprising (or at least were so to me.) Actually another (slightly archaic I think) phrase that specifically means "Right answer (to an arithmetic or math problem)" is gomeisan. The san here is actually not the honorific- it means arithmetic/math, pretty much. But I do wonder if it doesn't carry a bit of the feeling of the honorific because the sound is the same. Fujisan is another one like that. The san here means mountain, but it does make the phrase sound more respectful to my ear at least . Anyway, I'm starting to go pretty far off topic, so...
Btw, though meitou is officially written with the characters I gave (and most dictionaries will list only those), I think that the character Pete gave for mei is an alternate kanji for the phrase that used to be used quite a lot. Kanji usage was a lot less regular before the war, and there were significant reforms after the war.
Posted by: tds at October 02, 2009 05:51 PM (zjX5u)
. Anyway, I'm starting to go pretty far off topic, so...