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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