Monday, April 30

Anime

Nya Desu!

SDB wrote:

What's with this business of particular characters appending idiosyncratic endings to their sentences? The robot Pyoro appends "pyoro" to most of his sentences in Vandread. Ogres in Hell in DBZ end their sentences with oni. Wilhelmina in Shakugan no Shana ends all her sentences with de arimasu. (That's not quite the same, but it's similar.) And Domino also has a unique ending. Dejiko and Puchiko end their sentences with nya or nyu (or something like that), which in that case is a deliberate affectation because they're trying to be catgirls.

Wilhelmina's de arimasu (an affectation she shares with Keroro of Keroro Gunsou), like the desu of Kurumi and her ilk are at least vaguely grammatical (I believe).  And the ~nya and ~nyu of catgirls is almost universal.

But that geeto in Puchi Puri Yucie floored me at first; I wasn't following the subtitles closely and I thought that the gate was addressing Yucie in some strange manner I'd not previously encountered.  Then I twigged that the gate was, well, a gate.

It could be that this was popularised by Lum, but I'm made to wonder what we might find if we dug up a subtitled version of Astro Boy or Kimba...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:24 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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1 Naruto famously says "-dattebayo", with "da" being the real "da" of the informal speech. He does not add it to sentences ending with verbs, as far as I can tell. Kankuro of Muteki Kanban Musume adds "-nya". Hardly a catgirl... So it's quite common. I thought it had something to do with the character being somewhat goofy.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Monday, April 30 2007 01:39 PM (9imyF)

2 And then there's Kenshin's "De Gozaru" in Ruroni Kenshin.  Though they weeded that out after the first major arc.

:-D

Posted by: tommy at Monday, April 30 2007 01:46 PM (6CCYI)

3

Kanna in Happy Lesson ends nearly all her sentences with desu wa. But that's a known affectation, it's woman speech.

The dog-form kobolds in Petite Princess Yucie end their sentences with wan. Presumably that's an extrapolation of the catgirl nya.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Monday, April 30 2007 04:19 PM (+rSRq)

4 TV Tropes refers to this type of character as a Spoon Speaker after The Tick.  And the discussion there has an interesting pre-anime example: Gollum.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, April 30 2007 04:36 PM (PiXy!)

5

That listing on the TV Tropes page is amazingly long -- and they didn't even get most of the ones I listed.

Of the lot listed there, Lum still seems to be the earliest.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Monday, April 30 2007 05:18 PM (+rSRq)

6

Kenshin's de gozaru is an archaic form of keigo (polite speech).  Wikipedia has a pretty good article here.

I've never watched Naruto, but judging from what little I can infer from the character design, Naruto seems like a bit of a pugnacious punk.  As such, it makes sense that he'd have a tendancy to finish his sentences with "dattedayo" -- which I would loosely translate as "that's what I just said!"

It's hard to give the same gist of the phrase in an English sentence.  Maybe "I just smacked him upside the head, I did."

Dogs in Japan say "wan wan" when they bark.  Here's a blog post about the difference in barking onomotopea in different parts of the world.

I remember seeing a pretty long article about it once, many years ago, but the above link is all I could find in a fast google search ...

Posted by: bkw at Tuesday, May 01 2007 04:29 AM (bRLba)

7 Kankuro from MKM is deeply traumatized by never being able to defeat Miki (or even get her to remember his name), so he talks like a catgirl.

That's my interpretation, at least.  Silly, silly show.

Posted by: Griffin at Tuesday, May 01 2007 09:48 AM (0KVLJ)

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