Sunday, May 18, 2008


In other news...
posted at 9:59 AM

I thought it was impossible, but someone has figured out how to write maru-ma in text!

Really, I figured there should be a way--it's common to put a circle (maru) around a character. But all the KKM websites had it as a graphic, so that led me to believe it was impossible. Glad to know it's not; I can now write Kyou Kara Maou properly in Japanese.

Edit: Unfortunately I can't do it here, since it seems the maru is in UTF-8 and I foolishly set this blog to Shift-JIS back in the day. Someday I want to change it to UTF-8...but when I do I will have to edit all posts that have Japanese text in them >_<

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Wednesday, June 6, 2007


Japanese(?) in Smallville
posted at 10:40 PM

In episode 18 of season 5, Lex and Lana are coming back from their first date, if you can call researching various and sundry classified documents about space aliens over Japanese food a date. Lana tells Lex he could have warned her about the squid brains.

Lex responds, "Oh-EE-SHEE kara DAY SHOW", which I am guessing was supposed to be おいしいからでしょう, though I'm not sure. A quick Google search reveals that that is in fact a phrase. I've never heard anyone say it, but I'm guessing it could mean something like, "Because it was good, right?"

(おいしい = delicious, から = because, でしょう = kind of a copula with an opinion connotation, I guess. Jim Breen sez "(I) think; (I) hope; (I) guess; don't you agree?; I thought you'd say that!")

Lex's next line is "Come on, you can't fool me. You loved it," which is sorta-kinda a translation.

It occurred to me that he might have been saying 塩辛, but I definitely hear an "o" at the beginning of the phrase. Besides, what would 塩辛でしょう mean, anyway? "It was totally entrails, man"?

Anyway, I'm not knocking Michael Rosenbaum, who is a fabulous actor (not to mention totally hot). It's hard to get the pitch inflection of Japanese down right. You have to work to overcome the natural tendency in English to put stress on the penultimate syllable.

I just always find it interesting when people speak a language I'm somewhat familiar with :)

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All views, opinions, and statements expressed on this website are exclusively those of Heather Meadows, who assumes full responsibility for all opinions, statements, and other content presented herein.