Plaything of Sekhmet (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ikhet_sekhmet) wrote2014-06-28 02:48 pm
ikhet_sekhmet) wrote2014-06-28 02:48 pm
Entry tags:
Onee Kotoba and Emesal
Japanese appears to have an equivalent of Emesal, the variety of Sumerian used for reporting the speech of a woman, a goddess, or a gala.
I discovered this in the translators note on a manga (Japanese comic), which explains onee kotoba ("literally, 'older sister speech') as "a rough, effeminate form of Japanese often employed by gay and male-to-female transgendered individuals in which feminine pronouns, word endings, and intonations are used. For example, instead of using watashi (a common, polite, neutral pronoun meaning 'I') [the character uses] atashi, which is a colloquial pronoun that a young woman might use to refer to herself." (By contrast, a different manga has a girl-disguised-as-a-boy character joke that she will now use the pronoun ore, reserved for tough young men, to the shock of her would-be boyfriend.)
Emesal's differences from standard Sumerian might not have been as great - just some vocabulary and pronunciation - but I suppose it might not all have been preserved in cuneiform.
(I'll bet this is not the last parallel to Emesal that I'll come across if I start looking.)
(If you're curious, the manga in question are Black Butler volume 2, written by Yana Toboso and translated by Tomo Kimura, and Ouran High School Host Club.)
I discovered this in the translators note on a manga (Japanese comic), which explains onee kotoba ("literally, 'older sister speech') as "a rough, effeminate form of Japanese often employed by gay and male-to-female transgendered individuals in which feminine pronouns, word endings, and intonations are used. For example, instead of using watashi (a common, polite, neutral pronoun meaning 'I') [the character uses] atashi, which is a colloquial pronoun that a young woman might use to refer to herself." (By contrast, a different manga has a girl-disguised-as-a-boy character joke that she will now use the pronoun ore, reserved for tough young men, to the shock of her would-be boyfriend.)
Emesal's differences from standard Sumerian might not have been as great - just some vocabulary and pronunciation - but I suppose it might not all have been preserved in cuneiform.
(I'll bet this is not the last parallel to Emesal that I'll come across if I start looking.)
(If you're curious, the manga in question are Black Butler volume 2, written by Yana Toboso and translated by Tomo Kimura, and Ouran High School Host Club.)