Rewatching Shingu I suddenly became interested in the Japanese names for military ranks. They translate Weinul's rank as "lieutenant", but since he's navy I had been assuming he was an O-3. Actually, it turns out his rank is shoui, which means he's an O-1. They should have translated his rank as "ensign".

So I did a google search for "shoui chuui kuui" and turned up nothing but word lists. No one had a page about Japanese officer rank names. Thus: 

At least that's what the dictionary says. I think there's a mistake on the kanji for the first one. Symmetry suggests it really should be å°‘å°‰. æ…° means "consolation, amusement, make sport of". Clearly that isn't right.

Which gets me curious about the kanji, since the pattern is so regular. chuui is 中尉 which means "middle officer". Isn't that interesting? 少 means "little". 空 means "sky"; presumably implying "top".

For O-4 we have 少佐 "little assistant". And then middle and big.

For O-7 we have 准将 "associate leader". O-8 is "little leader". O-9 is "sea leader". And O-10 means "big leader". Some of those obviously don't make much sense taken literally, but our rank names don't, either. (Especially the confusion about the use of "lieutenant" and "captain".)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Japanese at 11:41 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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I'm rewatching the Frieza saga from DBZ. (Yeah, I know. Off my case.) And I've started noticing de aru and de arou a lot.

Now Wilhelmina in Shana ends nearly one of her sentences with de arimasu, but that's a linguistic affectation, a level of eccentricity that borders on insanity. It doesn't mean anything other than "Wilhelmina is unfailingly polite and more than a bit weird."

The -masu form is an indication of politeness, of course. But apparently use of aru doesn't inherently indicate that, given that I'm hearing Vegeta and Piccolo using it, in the same sentence in which they use kisama. These are not characters known for courtly manners.

I looked it up in the dictionary, and it said that aru means "to be" or "to have". But it's pretty obvious that the real meaning and use of the verb isn't coming through in that definition. Aru isn't the copula, that's da. And "to possess" is sonawaru or sonaeru. So obviously I'm missing the fine points here.

What is the difference between saying desu and saying de aru?

UPDATE: They were never very concerned with continuity in this series. One of the more annoying things is the way that body parts come and go. When Piccolo and Goku fought against Raditz, Raditz took off one of Piccolo's arms. Later Piccolo regenerated it, but before he did that, there are a couple of scenes where it's back.

When Gohan, Vegeta, and Krillin were fighting against Frieza, Krillin used a kienzan and took off about half of Frieza's tail. After that, in some scenes it's back and in some scenes it's missing, seemingly at random.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Japanese at 10:42 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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This is kind of a small spoiler about Petite Princess Yucie. I lament that I don't really speak Japanese, because I think I've been missing a lot of humor. more...

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Japanese at 02:02 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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Oh, you'll never guess what this is supposed to be:

えーえすしーあいあい e ^ esushi ^ aiai

It turns out to be ASCII. ee su shi ai ai. Everyone I have ever known has pronounced that Ass-kee but I guess that never made it across the ocean.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Japanese at 07:18 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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There's a name used for a particular ceremony, a festival, in Shingu that I've been trying to figure out. They translate it as "Shrine Descension". To my ears it sounds like mikoshyoroshi.

Can しょ be pronounced "shyo"? The problem is that it cannot be しお shi-o because the cadence is wrong. It's not a lengthened syllable. When Shun says it, near the end of ep 18, the five syllables are all the same length, and the "i" sound in the "shyo" is nearly imperceptible.

I wish I knew what it was. Is the "miko" in there the word that refers to priestesses? I'm going to have to hit the dictionary and see if I can come up with something.

UPDATE: You know, I'm beginning to get the hang of this, I think.

御輿 mikoshi is "portable shrine" and 颪 oroshi is "wind blowing down from mountains". Since in that festival kids carry a portable shrine down from the temple on Tenmo mountain to the beach and into the ocean, I'm sure that's it.

It also means I was wrong about the cadence, or else they're being sloppy about pronunciation. (Which has been known to occur.)

 UPDATE: One of the remarkable things about Shingu is how good Sato was at avoiding or subverting tropes that anyone else would have fallen into. But it's a mine field, with so many of them, and he did end up with one: the two teacher school. Of course, he still doesn't exactly fall into the trap, because neither of them are quite what they seem.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Japanese at 09:29 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Alright, this has been bugging me for months. It means "That's not what I meant" or "That's not what I'm talking about". It sounds to me like sojanakute but no matter how hard I try I can't parse it into words that I can find in the dictionary. Someone help me out here, please?

UPDATE: By the way, while I'm asking for help, there's a word or phrase I have been hearing a lot that sounds to me like kekko. There's definitely a glottal stop in there. I think it means something like "alright" or "OK". I can't parse this one, either.

UPDATE: Relating to the first one, another: So nakuto nai, desu yo! "That isn't the case!" That one's from Shingu, ep 10. (Yes, I'm watching Shingu again.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Japanese at 08:27 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Having noticed that Harumi tends to lose her "g" sounds in the word omigoto and the name Moriguchi, in the series Shingu, now I'm noticing that a lot of the characters do it.

The word "Shingu", in particular, seems to be bringing that out in a lot of characters. Jiltosh, Isozaki, and Myouken all pronounce it without a hard "g", so that it almost sounds like "Shinu".

Jiltosh and Isozaki do the same thing to "ningen", nearly losing the "g" in that as well. And the name "Asougi" is another giveaway. In the last episode, Myouken and Momoe pronounce it "Asoungi" with the "g" almost imperceptible.

So that's a girl, two women, and two men.

On the other hand, Nayuta says the "g" in "Shingu" strongly, and so does Muryou, that I've noticed so far. That's a girl and a boy.

I wonder what's going on with this? It doesn't seem as if it's accidental. One possibility: The city of Tenmo doesn't exist. They show various views that strongly suggest it's located about where the real city of Odawara is, SW of Tokyo on the coast. But I wonder if they're trying to make the purported location more indistinct by inducing an unexpected accent among those who live there? I don't think that people who actually live in Odawara would do that.

Of course, there's a different possibility. There's a Monty Python episode which is about Queen Bess and her courtiers and all of them swap all their L and R sounds. It turns out they're being directed by a Japanese man, and he's been telling them how they should pronounce everything. Could that actually be what happened here? Maybe the series director, or the voice recording director, has a Tohoku-ben and has been coaching all the seiyuu.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Japanese at 12:34 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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One of my regular readers will certainly understand this problem.

Of course, the solution is obvious: watch a lot of Dragon Ball Z and learn the way that Goku and Piccolo and Vegeta talk. Then you won't sound like a girl. (You'll sound like a lower-class anime roughneck, but at least you won't sound like a girl.)

UPDATE: When I was wondering about the word omigoto and asked about it, one of the reasons I was confused by it is that when Harumi says it, she largely omits the "g" sound. I had noticed that she also pronounced the proper name Moriguchi a bit strangely, changing the "g" sound and softening it a lot, making it sound like "ng".

I now wonder if she (or her seiyuu) was speaking with a Tohoku-ben. I just ran into a Wikipedia article on regional accents and it says:

In addition, all unvoiced stops become voiced intervocalically, rendering the pronunciation of the word "kato" (trained rabbit) as [kado]. However, unlike the high vowel neutralization, this does not result in new homophones, as all voiced stops are pre-nasalized, meaning that the word "kado" (corner) is roughly pronounced [kando]. This is particularly noticeable with the "g" sound, which is nasalized sufficiently that it sounds very much like the English "ng" as in "thing", with the stop of the hard "g" almost entirely lost.

That sounds like what I was hearing. But it's hard to believe that it was on purpose. It doesn't make sense for the character. She grew up in Tenmo, which is a fictional city located about where the real city of Odawara is, on the coast south-west of Tokyo. They wouldn't use a Tohoku-ben there, and no one else does that I've noticed. But I could have missed it. I don't have an ear for accents yet, at least to the point where I pick out consistent patterns. I notice the occasional -chama or -han distorted honorific, for example. But even though I know the two kids in Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi are speaking with an Osaka-ben, I couldn't tell you how it's different.

At the very least, no one else in Shingu does those strange things to their "g" sounds. That I do know.

I ran into that Wikipedia article because I was trying to make the point elsewhere that one reason the guy in that CS Monitor article was having trouble understanding the difference in male and female speech patterns was because he was also trying to untangle keigo and regional accents, and probably didn't have a big enough sample of distinct native speakers of all kinds to really pick out what was what. For instance, picking up edokko speech patterns wouldn't necessarily make him sound male; it would just make him sound uncultured and uneducated.

UPDATE: Harumi's seiyuu is Asano Masumi, who also did Saga in Sugar and Hakufu in Ikki Tousen. She was born in Akita, on the NW coast of Honshu. That's the heart of the Tohoku-ben.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Japanese at 02:18 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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In the 11th episode of Shingu, Hajime does something (I won't describe because it's a spoiler) and Harumi says something that sounds to me like omioto. That happens twice. Both times they translate it as "Well done."

What is it?

Speaking of interesting words, it's interesting that "Hajime" means "the beginning", "Nayuta" means "10^60", and "Muryou" means "immeasurable" (I think with the dual implication of "inscrutable" and "unlimited"). Most of the other characters have common names, but those three are unusual, and I think they're deliberately chosen. (Yes, I know that there are other characters named "Hajime".)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Japanese at 02:05 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
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In the first Sakura Wars OVA, Sakura unloads her first Cherry Blossom attack from her armor in combat. The result is pretty spectacular, but not quite what Yoneda wanted. The bridge they were fighting to defend took too much collateral damage and collapsed. After which we see this headline in the newspaper:

It wasn't really Sakura's fault. First off, she was trying to (and succeeded in) preventing an even worse result. Second, everyone as inexperienced, and as Yoneda himself told Sakura seconds before that, you can't learn unless you make mistakes.

Anyway, I recognized the "dai" in the second column and wondered what the actual headline read. It's this: 佃島相生橋 大崩壊

The last part means "utterly demolished". houkai means "demolish" and the dai before it means "big/large".

But I'm having a hard time making sense of the rest of it.

佃 "cultivated rice field"
島 "island"
相 means a bunch of things but I'm not sure which applies here.
生 "life, genuine, birth"
æ©‹ "bridge"

I think that 佃島相生 must be a proper name. And I'm guessing that there's nothing in there about a "military screwup". But I can't tell for sure. Anyone got any help for me here?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Japanese at 08:57 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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