Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei
| So I finished watching Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei a while ago and while I thought the show was pretty great, I'm not here to talk about the show itself. I was wondering if anyone could explain a little detail about the show that stuck out for me, mostly because I didn't really understand it. How and why does writing horizontally or vertically change the way a name (or anything, maybe?) is pronounced? I've tried looking for information on this (a little) but haven't come up with anything. So yeah, I'd appreciate it if anyone could shed some light on this for me. Any good links on the subject are also very welcome. |
| Not sure what you mean: either horizontally or vertically, most Japanese expressions can be read in several ways. It depends from the context, and from what "grammatical" ending is used -mas, -maru, -i, -ku, -no... ... like English "read" can either be a present tense, or a past tense: it depends on the context. Do you have an example maybe? edit: if you think pure kanji imagine they're written to form a square shape: you can then read them in two ways - like we do: ab, then the second line cd - or in colums bd / ac In most cases, the word formed by (ab;bd),(cd;ac) have probably different meaning example: re-ad and le-arn > adarn, lere |
EratiKMay 2, 2012 1:28 PM
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| An example from the anime would be Itoshiki Nozomu's name: 糸色 望 which can apparently be read "zetsubou" when written horizontally. I'd like to understand how and why that is, if possible. What's the mentality behind it? Or did I misunderstand something here? |
| 絶望 = zetsubou 糸色望 = itoshiki nozomu If you combine the two kanji of his surname horizontally it makes the first character for zetsubou. It's not obvious when written vertically: 糸 色 望 (not an expert, but that's my guess) |
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| 絶望 means despair, reading zetsu-bou, so here it's a special case: it's a kanji pun 糸 can be read ito or shi 色 can be read shiki, shika, shiko 望 can be read nozomu or bou. Here, the pun is that character one and two have fusioned to get 絶 zetsu (you'll see if you zoom). Edit: AAAAArgh, got ninjad! |
EratiKMay 2, 2012 1:47 PM
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Narmy said: 絶望 = zetsubou 糸色望 = itoshiki nozomu If you combine the two kanji of his surname horizontally it makes the first character for zetsubou. It's not obvious when written vertically: 糸 色 望 (not an expert, but that's my guess) This is pretty much the answer to the OP's question. Many Kanji are formed by combining radicals with phonetic components |
| Ah, so it was pretty much just a visual pun. I get it now, thanks you guise! That's pretty good, actually :P |
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