Weekend Edition, 3/14/10
Budget-conscious otakus, listen up: Right Stuf is running a promotion on all Bandai DVDs and books from now until midnight tomorrow (3/15). Just type the word lucky when checking out to get a 33 – 40% discount on your favorite anime and manga titles. Click here for details.
Elsewhere on the web, Lori Henderson lists this week’s new kid-friendly comics and summarizes the week’s biggest news stories, from Moto Hagio manga in English to three million copies of One Piece sold… Melinda Beasi reviews volume one of Stepping on Roses and volume three of Nabari No Ou… Michelle Smith is falling out of love with Love*Com… Laura Mucciarone sings the praises of High School Debut… David Welsh debates the wisdom of renaming his License Request column “Pestering Matt Thorn”… Kris dedicates her latest Bento Bako Weekly column to 9th Sleep… Greg McElhatton swabs the deck with Monkey D. Luffy and the One Piece gang… Erica Friedman deconstructs the appeal of Lucky Star with her characteristic mix of wit and erudition… and Zack Davisson awards four out of five stars to Alice in the Country of Hearts or, as I like to call it, Alice in Bishieland.
There’s something that really bothers me about Love*Com. How do you pronounce it? I need to know how the little voice in my head is supposed to say it! Every time it’s written, it says, ‘Love -bap- Com,’ and then I imagine it’s some romantic boxing story.
You pronounce it just “Love Com” … or you go with the full title “Lovely Complex” ^^
Thanks, lumi! Maybe you can demystify the pronunciation of the .hack// series for me. Those extra dots and dashes really throw me for a loop!
sure ^^ The general part “.hack” is pronounced as “dot hack”. The “//” are not pronounced. So, f.ex. “.hack//SIGN” is “dot Hack Sign”. (eventhough I usually forget the “dot” part ^^;; )
[...] helpful commenter explains how to pronounce Love*Com and .hack// at the Manga [...]
Thanks for the links, Kate!
@lumi: Thanks again! I’m glad to know that some of that punctuation is silent.
@Melinda: You’re very welcome!
One I always feel weird about pronouncing is xxxHOLiC, where all the X’s are silent!
At least they’re silent! Can you imagine trying to pronounce all those x’s?
One advantage (I guess) of almost all my discussion of manga taking place online is that I can avoid pronouncing things at all most of the time!
Here’s one I don’t know how to pronounce: Code Geass. How do you say that second word? You probably don’t want to know how I pronounce it in my head.
@Melinda: That’s exactly why I don’t do podcasts. No one wants to hear me massacring manga titles and artist names.
@Michelle: I’m not sure if it’s “Ge-AHSS”, “Geese,” or something more along the lines of “Gee-ass”… which about sums up my reaction to the whole franchise. I must be missing something, because I read some of the manga and the light novels and could never figure out why the various Geass series have such a following. Readers, anyone want to tell me what I’m missing? Or how to pronounce the title so I don’t sound foolish?
I always called it “Love dot Com,” which I knew was wrong but couldn’t help myself from saying…
Love dot Com sounds like a manga about wacky world of online dating! Surely someone has written just such an animal, no?
Viz’s Train Man had an on-line angle to dating. Nice three-volume story of heart-warming, yet clever gags and sentiment. Great for an afternoon read.
Iumi, thanks for the pronunciation guide!
Michelle, I like to sound it out like ‘Ex-acks-holic’ for some reason.
‘Geass’ is actually derived from the Gaelic ‘Geis’ and that opens up a whole new can of pronunciation worms. On the one hand, anybody with the vaguest interest in the language is very particular about how it has sounded for the past two millennium or so, but then again, we don’t even know exactly what English sounded like four hundred years ago.
To understand what’s so great about Code Geass, I suppose you have to watch the anime, which started it all ^^ It’s responsible for the hype surrounding this series. I don’t think the mangas have so many fans actually nor do I believe them to be as “Code Geass” (”epic train wreck”) as the anime ^^
I personally didn’t like it so much, but it just has a lot of suspense and many cliffhangers and something for everybody (mecha, cute girls, cool guys, fanservice, action, drama). The series was pretty much created to be a commercial success, and it worked.
The pronunciation for this one is not so easy, since it is a made up pseudo-foreign word. I’d say it’s similar to “gears” without the “r”
The pronunciation given in Japanese is very close to the one used for “gears” (only a shorter vowel). On the other hand, the pronunciations given for the real words “geis” and “geasa” are quite different from it.
btw, I agree that Train Man is a really nice little series. Highly recommend the live action series as well ^^
@Jade: I’ve read the Del Rey and CMX Train Men manga, so it will be interesting to compare ‘em with the VIZ series.
@lumi: Thanks for the low-down on Code Geass, appeal- and pronunciation-wise! What you say makes a lot of sense, and jives with my impression of the manga and light novels I read.
[...] but not least, thanks to lumi for schooling me on how to pronounce Code Geass and .hack//. I confess that the .hack// titles look more like Morse code than English to me, so it’s a [...]
So, if I’m understanding this right, ‘Geass’ is like… Gee-us, with a hard G sound?
yes, hard G ^^ Not like “geez”, eventhough that wouldn’t be so unfitting either
Can we hire you as the resident linguist/pronunciation expert for The Manga Critic, lumi?
I’m not an expert in linguistics, more like “fan” (nerd?). But I’m reading this blog regularly anyway, so if I happen to know something, of course I’m happy to help ^^
PS: I have just added Bunny Drop to my “plan to read” list as well. Looking forward to how it will turn out.
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