In episode 18 of season 5, Lex and Lana are coming back from their first date, if you can call researching various and sundry classified documents about space aliens over Japanese food a date. Lana tells Lex he could have warned her about the squid brains.
Lex responds, "Oh-EE-SHEE kara DAY SHOW", which I am guessing was supposed to be おいしいからでしょう, though I'm not sure. A quick Google search reveals that that is in fact a phrase. I've never heard anyone say it, but I'm guessing it could mean something like, "Because it was good, right?"
(おいしい = delicious, から = because, でしょう = kind of a copula with an opinion connotation, I guess. Jim Breen sez "(I) think; (I) hope; (I) guess; don't you agree?; I thought you'd say that!")
Lex's next line is "Come on, you can't fool me. You loved it," which is sorta-kinda a translation.
It occurred to me that he might have been saying 塩辛, but I definitely hear an "o" at the beginning of the phrase. Besides, what would 塩辛でしょう mean, anyway? "It was totally entrails, man"?
Anyway, I'm not knocking Michael Rosenbaum, who is a fabulous actor (not to mention totally hot). It's hard to get the pitch inflection of Japanese down right. You have to work to overcome the natural tendency in English to put stress on the penultimate syllable.
I just always find it interesting when people speak a language I'm somewhat familiar with :)
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2 comments:
Hahaha, I'd long ago given up on Japanese pronunciation by non-Japanese actors. Unfortunately my wife has the habit of making me pay attention now so I can tell her just how bad it really is, but I never hold out much hope.
And if you did hear what you thought you heard, then yes, your translation should be correct.
I watched that scene again today, and it struck me that while his stresses were totally off, he actually pronounced the sounds rather well. The r was at the front of his mouth, for example.
I like to think about what people focus on when learning other languages. I personally think pronunciation is very important, but as this scene demonstrates, there are many facets just to that.
It's also interesting to note that if someone has really good pronunciation, but is grammatically incorrect, it's very off-putting...or at least it is to me. Proper pronunciation builds up an expectation--it's kind of like a gateway into the land of native speakers.
These and other language problems were constantly on my mind when I was studying ESL in college, thinking about teaching English in another country. I don't know if that will ever happen, but the issues involved are fascinating!
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