December 28, 2008

Japanese -- kiwotsukeru

気を付ける kiwotsukeru is a verb that means "to be careful". In its imperative ("te") form kiwotsukete, it means "Be careful!" or "Take care!"

Is this a word that's been subject to pronunciation drift? In ep 7 of Nanoha, Lindy says it, and she leaves out the "w" sound. As she pronounces it, it's kiotsukete.

UPDATE: And later Nanoha says it the same way. And aha, I see what the problem is. This hiragana を used to be pronounced "wo" and now is pronounced "o". It's really rare; doesn't come up much. I'm guessing that the database uses wo in the romanization in order to prevent ambiguity with お.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Japanese at 07:22 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
Post contains 111 words, total size 1 kb.

1 "Wo" is always said with "w" deafened. It's just the way it is. By the way, did you notice that Konoe of Hanaukyo Maids is actually spelled "ko-no-weh"? It's a very rare kana.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at December 28, 2008 08:12 PM (/ppBw)

2 "Just the way it is" is very common in natural languages. I'm continually surprised by just how regular Japanese is and how little "just the way it is" I keep running into. English is a lot messier.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 28, 2008 08:22 PM (+rSRq)

3 I think that を is a grammatical marker in the idiomatic expression ki-o tsukeru, actually. In that use, を is always pronounce o. Wo is sort of the name of を, like t is called tee, or, in Spanish, ñ is called eñe (if my high school Spanish serves, anyway).

Posted by: Canthros at December 28, 2008 09:04 PM (QF0kY)

4 Easily the strangest such thing in Japanese is the way they write は for the "wa" particle instead of わ. Almost certainly there's no good explanation for why.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 28, 2008 09:11 PM (+rSRq)

5 Yeah, one of the things you learn early on when subbing is that occasionally a translator will throw romaji lyrics at you with "wo" instead of "o" or "ha" instead of "wa". Not all translators, er, watch the darned show to tell the difference. ;_;

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at December 28, 2008 10:02 PM (7TgBH)

6 It was trendy a while back to use the "wo" hiragana in names instead of "o".  Ka(w)oru from Eva is an early example.  It's almost run its course now, though.

Posted by: Toren at December 29, 2008 12:00 AM (3AWyf)

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.
7kb generated in CPU 0.0041, elapsed 0.0115 seconds.
21 queries taking 0.0087 seconds, 23 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.