Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.

— Mark Twain
Chapter 6, Page 4

Chapter 6, Page 4

So now anyone who’s better at Japanese has free reign to be snide at me. 🙂 ‘Dah’ (だ) and ‘neé’ (ね) are particles that indicate command and assurance respectively. I intended ‘Dahnai’ to be a combination of those. I’m sure the message carved into the wall is mis-constructed, but then again, the A.I. *was* crazy.

Non-japanese speakers may notice that Dahnai was spelled with different symbols (ダネ) on her statue in chapter four. That’s just how the japanese language does things. Although they’re the same sounds as the particles in the hiragana alphabet, proper names are always written in the katakana alphabet.

All right, that’s enough about naming conventions. What’s going to happen to Tatsu and little Dahnai? Just a few more pages left in this diversion before we get back to Jacob and crew.

↓ Transcript
Lynn: Is that a message to you? What does it say?
Tatsu: It's gibberish. The A.I. was just writing insanity. It just reads, 'She is'.
Lynn: All that for 'she is'?
Tatsu: It's screwed up. The particles 'Dah' and 'Neé' are used incorrectly. They're kind of like punctuation. They should never go together. It reads, 'She is dah neé'. you might loosely translate it as 'She is...!' ...with something like a 'dot dot dot' and a 'bang'.
Lynn: Well, I'm not gonna dissect her, Tatsu. Unless you want to, she needs a name.
Tatsu: Sigh. 'Dahnai' works, I guess. Why not.

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Discussion (8)¬

  1. Skur says:

    Ah, Japanese, you’ve got me again.
    I’m quite bewildered people can actually communicate in this language, since its sentences are…endowed with information rather modestly.

    It’s not true that da and ne never go together, though. As Gaijin pointed out last week, da is a form of “to be”, and ne is a question marker; if I recall correctly, I have seen people use it for “innit?” (And I hear it in animes from time to time.)
    But as “da” already is the verb, it shouldn’t go with desu.

    I’d transcribe ne differently, by the way. The syllable has a short E and if I didn’t know what was meant, I’d pronounce “neé” with two syllables as “nee-ay”.

  2. Remus Shepherd says:

    I’m sure there is lots that I’m getting wrong about the Japanese. Fortunately I think the page works as long as the message is gibberish. 🙂

    I’m pretty certain about the pronunciation, though. ‘Neé’ or ‘ney’ is how I learned it when studying japanese in college, and ‘ney’ is how Google’s speech translater speaks it.

    By the way, I’m out of town for vacation tomorrow, so I might not be responding to comments much this week. The comic for next week is already loaded — there’ll be no hitches.

  3. Gaijin says:

    “da” is actually the informal form of the copula in Japanese, not a grammar particle. “Desu” is the abbreviated form of the formal version “dearimasu”, which is rarely used. It’s roughly equivalent to the various forms of “to be” in English or “ta” at the beginning of sentences in Gaelic. “Ne” is an acceptable sentence-ender for declarative sentences ending in “da”. The wrong part was the use of “ha” (pronounced “wa”) in the middle.

  4. Skur says:

    Have a good vacation.

    I think we talk “past each other”, to use a German phrase.
    I wouldn’t dare to doubt that you pronounce the hiragana ’ne’ in a correct way, you don’t seem the kind of person not to check/know that. And because I know how ね is pronounced, I know how the word ’neé’ is supposed to sound when the Dr. says it.
    What I mean is that, were I oblivious of the pronunciation you intended, I would read the text “neé” with a pronunciation of “nee-ay” or “ne-ay”.

  5. Brad says:

    If the point was that the insane AI was writing Japanese using English word order, then it’s fine.

    I think what’s bugging everyone is a character with two speech balloons with an incorrect explanation of why it’s gibberish. Or maybe I’m just projecting. 🙂 I mean, you could get into a big argument about whether that trailing ne is particle or not, and what to call the Japanese grammar particles in English, but the simpler explanations would have been either:

    The order in the sentence is wrong: She is ‘Dahneh’ should have been “kanojyo ha dahneh desu.” (The ‘desu’ for ‘is’ goes at the end.) 🙂 Otherwise, as written, it’s “She is ‘Desu’, yeah.”

    Or, if this shows up right, something like:
    彼女はダネです。

    The explanation in the second two speech bubbles is pretty good, to my limited knowledge: the problem is that 彼女はです、だね is more like ‘”She is _____”, isn’t she?’ where the blank is provided by the conversational context, so you can’t really say anything that way. Just plastered on a board, alone like that, it would certainly qualify as irritating and insane.

  6. Brad says:

    On the other hand, I’ve managed to convince myself that what the AI scrawled on the wall would actually be legitimate Japanese for an obscure informal grammatical situation.

    Person A: What’s my next line?
    Person B: It’s ‘It’s her’. (As the more response to a question from a different character in the play.) (With the final ne being an inflection marker, and difficult to translate.)

    Foreign language grammar is weird. @.@

  7. Remus Shepherd says:

    Thanks, Brad! I might use one of those explanations and pretend that I had always meant it like that. 🙂

    This is the last time the *grammar* of any foreign language will be relevant, I promise.

  8. Brad says:

    No problem. I love the comic, and the ideas that you’re working through, so I’d be honored if those explanations helped out. 🙂