Sorry to hear that, Gryph.. best of luck catching the rerun
tomorrow night (tonight?). The gals seem - to me, at least -
to be even more lyrical in their native Japanese than they do
in English. Sweet singers, and I think I'll do as Marty suggested
and stick a crowbar into my wallet to buy their CD.

(personal note - maybe it's just me, or the way my ear 'hears'
their accent, but in the English version, it sounds to me like
they're pronouncing the word "Titan" as "Tight As". Very odd.
*shrugs* Or maybe I just need to scrape enough money together
to replace my antique POS television with one that has a decent
set of speakers..)

Edward A Becerra

The Japanese language never (well, at least not in my admittedly limited experience) puts two consonant sounds together. To them, a syllable is made up of a consonant sound followed by a vowel sound, and that's the way it must be. (The only exception I've heard is that the vowel at the end of a word might be dropped, if the speaker's in a hurry).

This gives Japanese folk trouble when they try to pronounce English words that are "outside" that pattern, and they tend to either insert extra vowels or drop some of the consonants. For example, "Macross" is pronounced "Ma-ku-ross". And there's the famous example from the Sailor Moon S movie, where Tuxedo Kamen proclaims,

"Melli Kalisumasu, ana Hoppi Noo Yah!"
""Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year!"

So, "Titans" was likely to get converted to either "Titanasu" or "Titahz," and the shorter version fit the song better. :)

Zox

I can think of at least two others; 'n' can happen on its own in Japanese, the only consonant that's not associated with a vowel. Also, when any of the 's' syllables - 'sa', 'se', 'su', or 'so' - occur in the middle of a word, the vowel is dropped, thus giving us "tetssaiga" instead of "Tetsusaiga" and "Tasski" instead of "Tasuki".

>So, "Titans" was likely to get converted to either "Titanasu" or
>"Titahz," and the shorter version fit the song better. :)

Taitansu. Which is actually pretty close. Closer than my name comes out, anyway - Neshan indeed. Hmph.

Blessed be.
-n

Reromanization of foreign words, especially proper names, that have been transliterated into the Japanese phonetic alphabets often come out amusingly at the other end. The canonical example of this is Belldandy, which is really just a clumsy reromanization of the kana for "Verthandi", but there are others. I'm always kind of darkly amused by that peculiar hard core of Revolutionary Girl Utena fans who insist that Anthy's name is to be rendered "Anshii", completely missing the fact that Anthy is, in fact, a Western name (Greek, to be exact; it means "flower", so you can't tell me it's just a coincidence :). This makes them both mindlessly strident and unobservant, two things I always look for in my truly discerning fandoms.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor in Chief, Netadmin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

Thank gawd.. I was honestly afraid it was me. Half the time I
thought they were singing "Tight As", and the other half I was
just as firmly convinced they were using ANOTHER word (which
sounds similar to 'as') that had me seriously wondering if I'd
lost my mind. Or maybe my hearing.

Knowing that it's the result of the word going from English to
Japanese and back to English makes it merely amusing. *grin*

BTW, Gryph, what did you think of tonight's episode?

Edward A Becerra

I Raven.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor in Chief, Netadmin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

*sigh* hopefully Titans will be imported up here in canada this season, so I can find out what it's like. I haven't read a lot of DC's stuff since the early 90s.

Norgarth

>*sigh* hopefully Titans will be imported up here in canada this
>season, so I can find out what it's like. I haven't read a lot of
>DC's stuff since the early 90s.

YTV is going to be carrying it. It's going to be in the Saturday morning lineup, IIRC, about 11:30.

Patrick
-losing faith in canadian television since the late 80's...

PS: You were right, the opening DOES remind me of the Secret Agent Man opening.

First, doubling of consonants can be done with s, t, p, and k. Secondly, in Tokyo accent and Osaka-ben, the su and shi vowels can be shortened and almost omitted. For instance, the names Tasuki and Asuka don't have a pronounced 'u' sound in them, and the word 'deshita' almost sounds like it is only 2 syllables. Words such as 'gakkou' and 'teppanyaki' illustrate the first instance. This is denoted in kana by a small 'tsu' character before the character to be 'doubled'.

For those who can see this... "てっぱんやき" and "がっこう" are 'teppanyaki' and 'gakkou' respectively, and "たすき" is 'Tasuki' (usually pronounced Taski with a very short vowel sound)

If I were kana-izing the word titans for class, it would come out "タイタンス" or 'taitansu'. IANAJ, so take that how you will.

--Maeglin

uh...not exactly

In japanese the 'u' sound tends to be skipped, so that, as above, 'Tasuki' sounds like 'Tasski'; it extends to other sounds as well...listen to Iron Chef in the Japanese and Ohta says 'Fukui' so that it comes out 'Fkui', and the 'ku' in the middle of words can be shortened as well, like the other post said, in Macross (ma-ku-ro-su) if another consonant/vowel sound follows it. 'Shi' gets swallowed so that the greeting 'Moshi-moshi', or hello, comes out as 'Mosh-moshi', or Mosh-mosh'. There is also the R/L pronunciation (in the japanese the 'ra-ri-ru-re-ro' phonemes have a sound somewhere between r, l, and d) that gives us 'flied lice' and 'ros anjures', and even experiences speakers of english (engrish?) tend to mess it up because they have difficulty seperating the concepts in their mind. Learning japanese as an english speaker has lots of pitfalls as well, but I won't bore anyone with them.

Offsides

[...] in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.
    -- David Ben Gurion
EPU RCW #π
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