April 29, 2008

One "hai" will do

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 甲斐 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.

Japanese sure is a foreign language...

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Japanese at 09:06 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
Post contains 233 words, total size 2 kb.

1 Hmm, indeed it's "hai wai - kai". Very mysterious.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at April 29, 2008 09:43 PM (qNSKg)

2 wai isn't a word.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 29, 2008 10:06 PM (+rSRq)

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)

4

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.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 29, 2008 10:19 PM (+rSRq)

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)

6

It's written in kana as はいはいっかい, 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 は 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/)

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