Myriad of Leaves

japanese

Thyselves

SPOILERS ARE CONTAINED WITHIN REGARDIN ELDEN RING. So a long-lived and stubborn pseudo-archaic typo is thyselves, itself an erroneous plural form of thyself, where the proper would be the yourselves, since it is literally the second person plural that is supposedly being used. Case in point, a quote from Elden

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Usage of Katakana

Knowing the difference between the two phonetic syllabaries of Japanese can be vital, when very much reading any mode or level of Japanese text. On a surface level they are distinct, one is "squiggly" (ひらがな), and the other is more angular (カタカナ), both of which derive from using

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Update post 30-03-22

Hello! Things have been going rather slowly if surely if terms of the progress of researching for various articles, mainly the ones concerning the speech patterns of various character arch-types in fiction. On the personal side of things that has been quite a few changes, mainly in terms of getting

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Elden Ring Spoilers - Name Allusions

From Software has a tradition of putting especial significance in their world building when it comes to structuring their role playing games, moreover, the latest instalment, Elden Ring only proves this. SPOILERS ARE BELOW, DO NOT PROCEED WITH READING IF YOU HAVE NOT PLAYED THE GAME, OR CARE FOR STORY

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X-Men vs Street Fighter - Victory Quote Commentary

Capcom's fighting game X-Men vs Street Fighter was nothing less, but a cultural phenomenon in the arcade halls of both Japan and in the West, in the year of 1996 (and later home-releases in 1997 - 1998). Taking the cast of one of the most popular fighting game

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Name Etymologies - Rock EXE series

One of my many interests when it comes to linguistics and especially also literature is that of personal names, when writing a story or a piece of media, the author(s) will some times create names that either are puns, homages or otherwise have significant meanings to either the personalities

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Quick Post - Old Sport

In the seminal novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the titular character of Jay Gatsby is a showman and playboy whose ostentatious lifestyle draws the attention of the protagonist and narrator of the story, a young journalist called Nick Carraway, whose enquiries into the life and secrets of

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Update - 24/01/2022

Greetings! Once more a quick update on how things are going and to keep you knowing what I have been up to. First and foremost, I am working on a rather massive comparison on how some 140 ninja speak from across all manner of media, mostly comics, cartoons, games, films

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New Year Post - Back to the Future

The year is drawing to a close and I thought I would include one last short translation comparison to round off the old year and herald the new year. What more fitting to do that than taking a look at two instrumental phrases from the science fiction trilogy Back to

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Yule Post the 2nd - Food

Preface: At last we come to the crown-jewels of any seasonal celebration, namely the food that populate the feast. The perfect way to investigate how Japanese translators would render specific Christmas dishes perhaps not known to them would be through the Dickensian lens of voluminous and opulent descriptions, where there

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Yule Post the 1st - Grantræet

We begin this year's Christmas themed posts with a look at one of Hans Christian Andersen's few yuletide fairy tales, aside from Den lille pige med svovlstikker ("the little match-stick girl"), wherein a sentient fir-tree experiences the existential crisis and threat over first waxing

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Update - 17/11/2021

A lot has happened since I last published my larger-than-usual translation comparison of the SoulsBorne series, in regards to the archaic language in those games. Namely, one of my older articles got linked by the excellent blog Mad SNK Project, whose work I have in the past mentioned in this

japanese

Archaic language in SoulsBorne

The popular action RPGs by From Soft are famed for their fair if fierce difficulty and a minimalist approach to tutorials, rather wanting players to learn by experience rather than by obsequious text-boxes. Text is indeed the very bread and butter of this blog, though more specifically the dialogue. If

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Hallowe'en Post - Darkstalkers

This quick and short obligatory All Hallow's Even post will be looking at a few interesting speech patterns from the horror-themed beat 'em up, Vampire. The roster boasts everything from ancient mummies to insectoid hive-mind demons that along with bizarre and unique move-sets - fighting game term

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Possible Oldest Dialect

Simon Roper, a linguistics enthusiast and knowledgeable gentleman on Youtube , posted a video not too long ago regarding whether or not there such a thing as an “oldest English dialect”, that is, one that retains the most archaic phonetic, syntactical, grammatical and/or vocabulary-wise features in contrast to other varieties

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Gemming Your Pardon?

Here is a quickie in regards to discovery I made in terms of a weird if interesting variant way of writing an old polite imperative or optative mode of constructing a verb, namely tamau (たまう, "to beg [a superior] to grant [a wish]"), which is typically written with

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The King of Fists and Pronouns

In this we will delve into how the concept of pronouns in Japanese or for that matter pronominals, and its relation to how our understanding of characters in a manga such as Hokuto no Ken (“Fist of the North Star”) may prove to show just how elastic the concept is

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Obi-Wan Too Many

Star Wars was released to massive acclaim in term of it bringing the space opera genre to a modern audience and introducing a viewing public to the world of Jedi and Droids. It received international release and would later be renamed Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope to fit

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SNK and Samurai

SNK has a long and time-honoured tradition of "creative" translations and this is primarily concerned with their fighting games that were released during the nineties. Often these translations would reference American pop-culture, contain strange slang and sound completely unlike the line that was in the original. Inspired by

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Update - 15/08/2021

So, I have not published any articles on this blog for a while, and for the sake of giving news in regards to where things are heading. I am working on research for several projects, and one blog post regarding SNK's bizarre localisation/translation of Samurai Shodown into

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The Ægyptian Stork

The tale of the Ugly Duckling (Den Grimme Ælling) is perhaps Hans Christian Andersen's most famous tale - part autobiographical story about striving against the odds, and part celebration of the sublimity of nature. Whilst a full analysis of the linguistics and narrative elements of the fairy-tale in

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Ducal Difficulty in 3D

Duke Nukem 3D, a FPS game featuring the titular pastiche of action heroes of the 80s and 90s, with all the corny lines and questionable macho-attitude, received a Japanese release for the PC, and in that vein it came with a manual. The translation work for this manual is the

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The Foul-Mouthed Miller

Geoffrey Chaucer, factotum of Plantagenet England and author of countless inimitable works of poetry, wrote towards the end of the 1400s his magnum opus The Canterbury Tales, wherein we follow a wide assortment and slice of society as they make pilgrimage towards Canterbury. Chaucer was a man whom had interacted

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Do excuse my rudeness, m'dude.

Hearkening back to one of my earlier posts where I remarked on how some characters in Japanese comics would use an overly assertive or informal pronoun, i.e. ore, when speaking in keigo, polite speech, I encountered the element in probably one of the most egregious cases. Case in point:

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The Mystic Tinderbox

Whilst researching for future posts, I was looking into the Andersen fairy-tale Fyrtøjet (The Tinderbox), which famously is about a soldier who fortuitously meets an old witch that offers him abundant riches if he is to help her retrieve a magical tinderbox that her grandmother forgot down in the bottom