August 28, 2010

Strike Wikitches

What you learn by visiting other people's blogs. I had no idea that someone had done a Strike Witches wiki.

It includes pages for all the main witches, and for each it gives the magical power, including the Japanese name for it. So:

Wilcke: 空間把握 Kuukan Haaku (Area Analysis; lit. "Space Understanding")

Sakamoto: 魔眼 Magan (Magic Eye)

Barkhorn: 怪力 Kairiki (Superhuman Strength)

Yeager: 高速 Kousoku (Speed Boost; lit. "High Speed")

Hartmann: 疾風/シュトルム Shippuu/Sturm (Storm, Vortex, Gale, Hurricane, etc.)

Eila: 未来予知 Mirai Yochi (Foresight)

Sanya: 魔導針 Madou Hari (Magic Antenna; lit. "Magic Needles")

Lucchini: 光熱攻撃 Kounetsu Kougeki (Sunlight Strike; lit. "Light and Heat Attack")

Perrine: 雷撃/トネール Raigeki/Tonnerre (Lightning Strike/Thunder)

Bishop: 弾道安定 Dandou Antei (Ballistic Stabilization; lit. "Ballistic Stability")

Miyafuji: 治癒魔法 Chiyu Mahou (Healing Magic)

Reading the various articles, it looks as if it hasn't been updated much since the second season began. For instance, it describes Perrine as having strong antagonism towards Yoshika, which was true in the first season but definitely is not true in the second. In the second season, Perrine considers Lynne and Yoshika to be her closest friends in the unit.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 06:52 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
Post contains 186 words, total size 2 kb.

1 This may be one of those questions that only a linguist (or a fluent speaker of Japanese) can answer, but I thought the word for "magic" was mahou.  But then I see that the word for magic when referring to Sanya's yagis is "madou". 

Is that a misspelling?  Or a word for a different type of magic?  Or is it used the same way?  Or should I just relax?

Posted by: Wonderduck at August 28, 2010 07:25 PM (ODvBe)

2 There are several words you might see: mahou, madou, majutsu. The first kanji is the same for all, 魔 = witch/demon/evil spirit, but the second one carries the flavor of what sort of magic it is: hou = 法 = method/system; dou = 導 = guidance/leading; jutsu = 術 = art/skill. Majutsu is often used for stage magicians and jugglers, but mahou implies real magic.

Madou wasn't common enough to have an entry in GG4 in the Seventies, but it's in more recent references; in this case I suspect it was used for its similarity to dendou = 伝導 = conduction/transmission, given the "antenna" reference.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at August 28, 2010 08:19 PM (2XtN5)

3 The ma J mentions is the same one used in daimaou 大魔王, which means "great demon lord".

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at August 28, 2010 08:52 PM (+rSRq)

4 At this point there's really no difference; they're more or less interchangable. The Fate/Stay Night universe draws a distinction between Majutsu and Mahou, and a few other works of fiction do as well, but most don't, really. 

I guess one thing to note is that Madou is never used a stand-alone noun, it's always part of a compound like madoushi (Mage) or madousho (Spellbook).

Posted by: tellu541 at August 29, 2010 04:11 AM (pJ1uW)

5 I just heard madou enjin.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at August 29, 2010 08:19 AM (+rSRq)

6 I found a few standalone uses of madou (魔導の宝物庫, 大魔導の結界), but yeah, it's much more likely to be the beginning of a compound word (the single most popular use seems to be the game Madou Monogatari).

Oh, and if your search leads you to the Artificial Magical Girl doujin manga (人工魔導少女), NSFW!

-j

Posted by: J Greely at August 29, 2010 08:36 AM (2XtN5)

7 Eh, yeah.  Maybe 'compound' was unclear.
What I was trying to say is you can't use it as a stand-alone word.  You can 'mahou wo tsukaeru' (Use magic) but you can't 'madou wo tsukaeru'. 

Posted by: tellu541 at August 29, 2010 03:29 PM (pJ1uW)

8 Sounds like madou is an adjective.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at August 29, 2010 04:39 PM (+rSRq)

9 I've found maybe half a dozen examples where it really was used as the noun "magic" ("madou demo ii janai", "madou o meguru arasoi", etc), compared to a few thousand where it was used to modify another noun. So, grammatically a noun, but not the one people usually think of when they want to talk about magic itself.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at August 29, 2010 10:10 PM (2XtN5)

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