Calling StealthNoodle! Help!

[auronlu]

I think you've explained this before, but now I'm all muddled again.

What do these mean? Would a Japanese speaker associate these words due to their similar sounds, almost like puns or wordplay of some kind?

シン = Sin in Final Fantasy X, pronouned "Shin." The ... katakana? ... is phonetic.
神 = shin as in god, spirit, kami, shinto? (This is Kanji?)
死 = Shi, death? (This is kanji?)

And on top of all these is loaded the English meaning of "Sin."

Yes/no? Am I understanding, or am I conflating unrelated words because they sound similar to my ear?

Comments

[stealth_noodle]

シン is katakana, yep, which usually means it's a phonetic transcription of a foreign word. (Robots and aliens also tend to speak in katakana, to show that they talk funny.)

神 is indeed kanji! Like most kanji, it has different pronunciations depending on its precise shade of meaning and whether it's standing along or being used in a a compound. (E.g., the religion Shinto is written 神道, which is this kanji's "shin" reading plus the kanji for way/path's "tou" reading, while you'd write "god of love" as 愛の神, "ai no kami.") Usually you'd pronounce this in isolation as "kami" rather than "shin."

死 is also kanji. Because of how Japanese works, "shi" and "shin" are pretty distinct words (the "n" sound is its own sorta-syllable--if you write "shi" and "shin" in hiragana, they come out し　and しん respectively). I'm not fluent and definitely not a native speaker, but I can't recall ever seeing shi/shin used a pun before.

So with my "not a native speaker" caveat: I think it would be fair to assume that シン mostly evokes the English word "Sin" but is also playing at least a little on 神 as in holy, divine, etc. 死 is is probably not part of the wordplay here.

[auronlu]

THANK YOU!

So with my "not a native speaker" caveat: I think it would be fair to assume that シン mostly evokes the English word "Sin" but is also playing at least a little on 神 as in holy, divine, etc. 死 is is probably not part of the wordplay here.

Okay, that clears it up.

This train of thought was triggered by my watching undub of Wakka telling Tidus about Chappu. I noticed that when Wakka said that Chappu was dead, the word for dead sounded like it had a "shin" sound in it. It was probably blending into the next word, however. But that piqued my interest: was it close to the same sound being used for Sin's name?

I also remember that waaaay back in original Vampire Princess Miyu, there are the "shinma", a term that show uses for gods and demons living in the spirit world.

So then I looked up the Japanese for "spirit" and got 精神, seishin, and I peeled off 神 and got the wikipedia article for Kami, and I was all confused. (Is it pronounced "Shin"? Or is it "kami"? Is that the "Shin" sound in "Shinto"? Is that the "Shin" sound in the name of FFX's monster "Sin"? Or, if not, would a Japanese speaker nevertheless hear and notice the similarity?)

I love it when a word is polyvalent, with a literal meaning as well as associations / connotations. But I know that I tend to pick up on homophones that most people would never think of. (Aeris/Eris, e.g., and when I was very young, I assumed the word "poetry" came from Edgar Allan Poe.)

I also love the fact that katakana exists. I find it fascinating that there's a special writing system used to indicate foreign, alien words. It's certainly not something one could find in English, although we do occasionally italicize recent borrowings that are not yet naturalized.

[stealth_noodle]

Japanese writing is super-fascinating and half the reason I started studying the language. (Katakana and hiragana both have really fascinating histories, involving monks annotating Chinese texts and women not being educated in Chinese writing, respectively. And one trick manga writers love to use is to name something in kanji for the meaning of the characters, with accompanying pronunciation-indicating hiragana or katakana [called furigana] that are nothing like any traditional pronunciation for those characters.)

I can tell you why the undub confused you! Tidus says 死んだ ("shinda"), which is the past tense of 死ぬ "shinu" (die). Japanese being the party language that it is, the "nda" portion is the past tense indicator; the verb stem is "shi" ("nu" is sort of the present tense ending). So a Japanese person hearing "shinda" isn't going to be thinking of "shin" as its own cluster within the word.

I assumed the word "poetry" came from Edgar Allan Poe.

I cannot tell you how much I love this.

[auronlu]

Mmmm, linguistics! Thanks. I've gotta give in and take a Japanese class sooner or later.

... I imagine most five-year-olds were not entertained by their mother declaiming "The Raven" in a comedic style.

[stealth_noodle]

Ha ha ha, we may have had somewhat similar childhoods. I was in my teens before I realized that most people don't have a favorite grammar book.

[auronlu]

*clutches my Gildersleeve's Latin Grammar and nods sagely*

...dangit, I can't remember the name of the English grammar I had in grade school. I made a very pretty book cover for it.

[stealth_noodle]

I had an odd youthful fondness for Fowler's because the man was so particular. We had a printing from the 1940s, so the entire book was this wonderland of strong feelings about phrases I'd never heard anyone actually say. Result: I was a profoundly pedantic twelve-year-old.

I have a Japanese-language Spanish grammar book that is seriously one of my favorite things on my bookshelf. It works so hard to explain gendered plurals!

[akycha]

I had no idea that you thought "poetry" came from Poe! That is adorable.

Also, I as enjoying your language geeking so much that I wanted to note that you sometimes do get multi-lingual punning in Japanese (I assume Stealth_noodle knows this). The example I know about is from bosuzoku (er, motorcycle thugs). Their group names are usually very masculine and threatening, but are written on their jackets using kanji that have really positive Chinese meanings.

For example, a gang called (I am TOTALLY MAKING SHIT UP because I cannot find my ethnography of bosuzoku and thus cannot give you a real example also I have no kanji font so could not give the Japanese-readers the example properly anyway) the "Electric Murder Weapons" in Japanese might use kanji that read in Chinese "Health Family Fortune." I wish I could find my book, the actual examples were much better and I was really impressed.

I love double-language punning.

[auronlu]

I always wondered if some sort of wordplay was going on with a cheesy anime I used to watch around 1990: the crime-fighting duo called themselves the Lovely Angels, but the name of the series was Dirty Pair.

...Then again, that series was so full of jokes and catch-phrases that it could have been any kind of silliness. (E.g. they were rummaging through a bunch of blueprints at one point, and the Next Gen Enterprise technical diagrams unfurled, then rolled back up).

[akycha]

There's a reference back in Next Gen: in one of the episodes, you can see a diagram of a solar system with the twin moons "Kai" and "Yuri" (the names of the Dirty Pair) in the background.