Forum - View topicGintama accent?
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GoodLuckSaturday
 Posts: 567 Location: Indiana |
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Watching Gintama, I noticed the character Kagura speaks a little differently from what I typically hear in anime. She ends her sentences in something that sounds like a "la le lo"-esque ending. Her pattern of speech seems different in general, but this sticks out to me. Is Kagura's speech pattern that of an actual speech pattern or accent, or would this be a catchphrase ending like with Naruto's "-bayo?"
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abunai
Old Regular
 Posts: 5463 Location: 露命 |
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I haven't seen Gintama yet, but what you describe sounds like she is making frequent use of the grammatical passive form. If that is the case, it may qualify as a distinctive speech pattern (or you may just be reading too much into it).
There are two versions of the passive form, the ordinary passive (conveying the idea that "something was done to me, and I was adversely affected by it") and the causative passive (conveying the idea that "I was made to do something, and I was adversely affected by it"). Ordinary passive is formed by adding -areru/-aremasu to ichidan verbs (or -wareru/-waremasu for verbs ending in two vowels, such as omou), and -rareru/-raremasu to godan verbs. Causative passive is formed by adding -aserareru/-aseraremasu to ichidan verbs (or -waserareru/-waseraremasu for verbs ending in two vowels, such as omou), and -saserareru/-saseraremasu to godan verbs. Does this seem like it hits the spot? - abunai |
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GoodLuckSaturday
Posts: 567 Location: Indiana |
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It does, and that does seem to be just what Kagura is using. Many thanks! |
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hayakunero
Posts: 61 Location: 日本 |
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Gintama is in my top 5 jump manga.  Gintama is funny! ( I also like Motetou and Maison de Penguin.)
She often (usually?) says "aruyo" (no counterpart in Englisih) in the end of her sentences. So she sounds like a Chinese. (I don't think a real Chinese speaks Japanese like Kagura-chan.)
exactly. No offence and excuse my poor English. 
I don't think that to enjoy reading or watching Gintama is as easy as you enjoy Naruto or Bleach if you don't understand the Japanese language and don't know Japanese history. (You should know about at least Shinsengumi.) For some reason it's almost impossible to translate Gintama into other languages accurately. なんていうかその言葉のやりとりが面白いんだけど、外国語に訳せるのかなぁ? 日本人ほどは無理にしても、それなりに楽しんでくださいな。 |
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Arkard
 Posts: 677 Location: Poland |
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OK...
OR it could simply be the simple honorific form, which coincidently has the same structure as the passive form (-(r)are-ru). Accidently, a woman who uses this simple form full-out, in almost every sentence, would be considrered a well educated high-class lady. So I do believe that is the case here. I cant imagine her using the passive form so alot that it would attract the attention of a non-japanese speaking person. |
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Gauss
 Posts: 519 Location: Finland |
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And if the passive form indicates an adverse personal effect she would come across as something of a whiner, ne?
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Zalis116
Moderator
 Posts: 6900 Location: Kazune City |
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I'll DL and take a look at Gintama just for this post
 , but one thing I've noticed is that Japanese seems to use the passive voice much more often than English. For instance, what appears in subtitles as "The enemy saw me!" might be in passive voice, like "(watashi wa) teki ni mirareta" (literally, "I was seen by the enemy!") rather than the more wordy "teki ga watashi wo mita," which would be active voice. It's all about word economy, as we know.
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hayakunero
Posts: 61 Location: 日本 |
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Why are you guys talking about passive form? Does Kagura always use passive form in the English version? Or does passive form have something to do with Kagura?
anyway I like to see how foreigners talking about Japanese. Very interesting. |
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abunai
Old Regular
Posts: 5463 Location: 露命 |
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Hehh.... now I've had the chance to see the first episode of Gintama. Putting aside for the moment the fact that I didn't find it very entertaining, I've now listened to Kagura, and I think I've identified the speech pattern that you triggered on.
Kagura terminates her sentences using aru where we'd normally expect a desu. So we hear sentence terminations like ...aru yo, ...aru ne, and just plain ...aru. I recognise this --for some obscure reason, this is the Japanese stereotype of what a Chinese speaker sounds like when misspeaking the Japanese language. Kagura is supposed to sound Chinese. This matches with her dress and hair style, which are both Chinese. - abunai EDIT: Duhhh... I just now noticed that, since I'd made my original post, hayakunero had made this very same point. Oh well, "great minds think alike". 
Last edited by abunai on Tue Apr 25, 2006 7:58 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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shinobi
Posts: 7 Location: uk |
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abunai is right there i think, but it could also be a atempt at a shuji/yonabaru accent prehaps.
ayu-go, ay-ro, hua, so wa, is usely tacked onto the end of a okinawan accent, think of it a bit like slang in a sense. and in some cases someone who speaks yonabaru when speaking mainland japanese will cut words in half and replace them with these terms sort of like a "pig-japanese" kind of thing. can be very funny to hear
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jaybug39
 Posts: 552 Location: Oregon, Is it FOOTBALL yet? |
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Do yo mind if I put this here? I was watching Ai Yori Aoshi and the Tina Foster character, who is supposed to be American, was outted for having a Hataka accent. What was that, and was this something that I could have easily picked up on, like a Cajun accent?
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xuebaochai
 Posts: 85 Location: An unstable world |
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She has a Hakata accent. That's the (very distinctive) dialect of Fukuoka, in northern Kyushu, the southernmost of the four main islands of the Japanese archipelago. Having a foreigner speak with such a strong regional dialect is intended to be humorous (imagine a Japanese character speaking with a strong Geordie or Appalachian accent). BTW, she didn't pick it up, she grew up in Hakata -- spoiler[IIRC, it's established in the series that her fluency in English is very questionable! ] For whatever reason (probably Seiyuu-related), it is not all that common for a foreign Anime character to have a consistently foreign accent (i.e. distinctively foreign sound patterns). So a character's foreigness is usually marked by peppering his/her speech with foreign words ("what?" is very popular), maybe a retroflex "r" or two, and quite often stereotyped and funny syntax. The -aru pattern to mark Chineseness is of this last type, and it's fairly common (interestingly, in manga, katakana is often used to mark Westerness -- and an excessive amount of kanji to mark Chineseness). Why the "aru" copula has become the standard stereotype for Japanese-speaking Chinese is a complete mystery. I know dozens of Chinese who speak Japanese at all levels of fluency, and never have I heard that use of "aru". For Hayakunero: the correct translation of -aru yo would be to use stereotyped Chinese-flavored patterns in English (you no pay, you no get!) -- but that would sound spectacularly politically incorrect 
Edit: an interesting example: the use of language quirks to mark characters (including aru, Shampoo) in Ranma. |
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abunai
Old Regular
Posts: 5463 Location: 露命 |
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博多区, Hakata -- not "Hataka". It's a city in Fukuoka prefecture. Tina is American, yes, but she's been brought up in Japan, and she speaks a non-standard dialect. Hakata-ben (-ben meaning dialect) is fairly well-known in the rest of Japan as one of several types of "countrified" dialects. If you speak Hakata-ben, you sound very provincial. Some typical deviations of Hakata-ben from Hyoujungo (Standard Japanese) are:
Tina is one of my favourite side characters in Ai Yori Aoshi. One of the best episodes in the series, in my opinion, is episode 18, spoiler[where she spends the night with Kaoru in a love hotel.] It adds a lot of depth to her character. - abunai |
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jaybug39
Posts: 552 Location: Oregon, Is it FOOTBALL yet? |
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Well a big thanks to Xuebaochai and Abunai. Well, so the answer to a part of my query is yes. I was wondering why Tina would say some things that translated into english words quite different from what Aoi or anyone else said. Use Abunai's Lexical list to illustrate.
Must be learning something if I think I am hearing things wrong! 
So is there the equivalent of "y'all" in Japanese? |
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xuebaochai
Posts: 85 Location: An unstable world |
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Y'all? I cannot recall the exact word used by Tina that the fansubbers are translating like that. Their intention is probably to replicate the rather rustic feel of the Hakata accent by using forms found in Southern accents. There are two complicated issues here, one the nightmare called the Japanese pronoun system, second the sociolinguistics of register translation.
Japanese has an extravagant pronoun system, there are dozens of possible equivalents to "you", each with different connotations and usage. There are hundreds of papers on the complexities of this system. Here is a list of the terms conventionally called “pronouns”. There are more, especially if you consider regional dialects. In general, “pronouns” are used very sparingly in Japanese (in fact, I think they are probably used a bit more often in manga and anime than in real conversation. Don't quote me on this, though). Surnames, names, titles, occupations, kin relation (Oniichan!!) or other titles like “Senpai” will be used considerably more often than pronouns. In fact, some linguists do not even analyse Japanese pronouns as pronouns, but as terms of address, personal nouns or "referential nouns", because they are grammatically almost indistinguishable from all other nouns (Even taking deictic markers “kono watashi”, literally “this I” is a fairly common intensifier of 1st person reference). Even worse, as part of a wicked plan to drive all gaijin learners crazy, Japanese tends to avoid *any* overt markers of reference if possible. A sentence carrying no overt subject whatsoever is not only well-formed, it's standard in many contexts. Tracking referents in Japanese is a six-tylenol problem for unfortunate foreigners. Quite often, you have to detect cues from context, and from shifts of levels of politeness etc in order to correctly attribute a subject to a sentence. In fact, it can be difficult for native speakers: for instance, "School Rumble" has dozens of gags and entire plot arcs hinging on confusion regarding sentence reference (it’s quite a useful series for the perplexed learner, in fact). Now, on the issue of how to translate the “feel” of a non-standard dialect like Tina’s: it’s a messy problem. Naturally, the stereotypes and connotations associated to accents and dialects do not map well across languages. The default option by most American translators is to use Southern dialectal forms to translate pretty much all non-Tokyo dialects, simply because Southern accents are the most sociolinguistically distinct in America. If Brits were doing the translating, they could choose from a much wider array of accents and dialects to try to replicate the feel, but the US is notoriously short of dialectal variation. An important case is the Kansai dialect, particularly the Osaka dialect. Osaka-ben is used extensively in anime to signal a number of character traits. The most common is the comedic Bokerole, so the translating tendency is to give that character a “Forrest Gump” diction –as (IIRC) in Abenobashi Shoutengai and Azumanga Daioh. The stereotypes about Osakans, however, are not at all redneck. Osakans stereotypes include being blunt and rude, hyperactive, sneaky and stingy (at times, it feels like old-fashioned anti-semitic stereotypes): a New Yoik accent would probably be a much better choice (and Borscht Belt shtick a very close match for manzai-style exchanges: 一塁にだれやねん？). |
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