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whatudottu · 7 months ago

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Combined with the mortifying realisation that loopified Odile (now named Nokosu) took me multiple hours to draw the first time, I decided to try and make one speak in Japanese :) :) :)

The Japanese sentences will be under the cut plus a more literal translation and some research notes-

自分は遺残の神である。「遺す」と呼んでもいいし、「残」の字を使ってもいい。お前の草白鳥は、すでにお前の小烏から「イサ」という名前を取っている。二人の人間に同じ名前を使うのは混乱しないか？ヴォーガルド語の「サ」の発音は「ザ」に近いので、特に必要である。そうだろう？

or in Romaji

Jibun wa izan no kamidearu. 'Nokosu' to yonde mo īshi, 'zan' no ji o tsukatte mo ī. Omae no kusa hakuchō wa, sudeni omae no ko karasu kara `Isa' to iu namae o totte iru. Futari no ningen ni onaji namae o tsukau no wa konran shinai ka? Vu~ōgarudo-go no 'sa' no hatsuon wa 'za' ni chikainode, tokuni hitsuyōdearu. Sōdarou?

Literally translated Nokosu says;

I am the god of remains. You may call me “Nokosu", or you may use the [Chinese character] for “remain". Your grass swan has already taken the name “Isa” from your little crow. Isn't it confusing to use the same name for two people? It is especially necessary since the pronunciation of “sa” in Vaugarde is close to “za”. Wouldn't you agree?

And for the explanations of a monolingual English speaker with barely even surface level understanding of Japanese.

Throughout my entire journey, Jisho.org kanji dictionary has been my saving grace and backbone in my choice of Nokosu's name and what first and second person pronouns one uses. My initial goal was to find a name for survival or persistance which lead to me finding terms like; 存続 (sonzoku) meaning survival, 存 meaning exist and 続 meaning continue; 耐久 (taikyuu) meaning endurance, 耐 meaning the affix -proof (of bulletproof or soundproof), 久 meaning long time; and finally 遺残 (izan) meaning persistence, 遺 meaning bequeath, 残 meaning remainder.

To kinda help expand my knowledge of the terms I was using, I also used a combination of google translate (primarily for the pronunication of words less the actual translations) and DeepL to kinda get the sweet deets and found that izan had meant - a more common definition - remains. It. Was. Perfect.

Perfect save for one thing... Isa- Sure, Isabeau is his full name and written down Isabeau and Izan are unique enough, but technically functionally the 'sa' in French (and thus in Vaugardian) is more voiced than the 'sa' in Japanese and sounds more like the 'za' in izan, and to have Odile refer to Nokosu as Izan when "only [Siffrin] call[s] him Isa" is an in-game quote; to say I was miffed was an understatement.

But then... I turned to words that use those individual kanji and hoped to mix and match to find what I wanted.

My first direction was to turn each kanji into hiragana to find their pronunciations and piece together a word from that; 遺 in isolation is noko, 残 in isolation is zan. Finding the term no ko zan-kiri (のこざん切り) on google gave me 'chopped into pieces' which well- look at my design that's a lot of pieces! のこ残 or nokozan (turning the first character into hiragana of course) lead me to 'remnants of a servant's body' as it's main translation on DeepL, but it also provided 'backbreaking exertions' as well as 'remnants of a defeated soldier'. Plus using DeepL again izan itself full kanji gave me 'vestiges' 'bequest' 'afterlife' and the ever present 'remains'.

None of these however were getting me closer to an ample replacement for izan however, not until I returned to jisho.org to pick out words from a list using either kanji.

Turns out, both 遺 and 残 can be pronounce 'noko' so long as it is followed by the hiragana す or su. And guess what either spelling of the word translates into? The 遺す version meaning to leave (behind), to bequeath, and the 残す version meaning that same thing but more, to leave (undone), to save/to reserve, to stay (in the ring).

SO! SO! That is how Nokosu came to be named! But- what about the Japanese phrase I wrote?

Well- let's stay on the Nokosu theme now that any Japanese readers in my audience have already processed the meta-joke that can only really exist in Japanese writing (or maybe not a joke but like... a fourth wall acknowledgement). Nokosu already introduces oneself as 遺す though doesn't mention how to spell it (since it's already spelt out to the reader), then introduces the second variant of the spelling exclusively referring to the second kanji of Izan 残 as zan. Maybe it's not really a joke but it'd kinda be like the 'you use he/they, it's in your profile' equivalent.

I suppose an attempt at a joke was Odile thinking 'a very wordy Expression', but that's mostly from observing that translations through DeepL stopped run on sentences occuring from English to Japanese so... I have no idea if constant uses of commas isn't particularly Japanese, at least the joke would be that Nokosu is particularly more chatty than Odile might normally be.

And once again, people who know Japanese may have noticed the use of jibun (自分) and omae (お前) for Nokosu's pronouns. Lowkey I was thinking initially of making Nokosu's first person pronoun oira a la sans undertale 'country bumpkin' but found more interesting things with jibun and omae that I settled on those versions. jibun, a neutral formality pronoun literally meaning 'oneself', when used as a personal pronoun (like Nokosu does) it's with a sense of separation of distance to the self; I also found out in my translation hunt that jibun can be used as a second person pronoun which is very fucking fitting given who Nokosu talks to, but that's specifically from in the Kansai dialect and - well - I can't say for certain where Odile hails from especially since Japan in ISAT is Ka Bue, but she'd be well educated enough to connect the dots that Nokosu lays down. On the other hand, Nokosu's second person pronoun is omae (Fist of the North Star fans will remember it from the very iconic 'omae wa mou shindearu'), which is incredibly informal and very rude when said to elders (though in age technically Nokosu is older) as it's meant to express the speaker's higher status in non-casual relationships.

To note, though omae can be used by both genders, it and jibun are mostly used by men and in the case of omae it's more commonly used to refer to their wife or lover. This has a little extra significance to background headcanon where Nokosu calls Odile Nanafushi (七節) or literally walking stick AKA a stickbug as ones version of 'Stardust', but sometimes Nokusu would split the word in half and refer to Odile as 'Nana' which in English sounds like one is referencing a grandma but (BUT) I'm specifically using the French term which translates to 'chick' 'babe' 'girlfriend'. So when I saw that omae can also be used for that purpose, it really goes to show that at some point Nokosu had the time to perfectly craft a version of oneself that does get on Odile's nerves and has the gall to get away with it at least initially under the assumption that one is an Expression.

I've been trying to make this flow from one point to another but I don't know how to jump to Japanese nicknames, at least not the metaphorical ones that I used here (and took inspiration from the Word of God Odile nickname for Siffrin 'Little Crow'). What little I do know about Japanese nicknames is that they may take alternate readings of single kanji as a nickname or repeat a character, though that is in reference to Japanese names in the first place. I did see something about the metaphorical sort of nicknames that have connotations in the language itself but- honestly this is my most monolingual English moment yet. I will explain however what I did decide.

草白鳥 or kusa hakuchou is the character for grass 草, and the kanji combination for swan 白鳥. In DeepL however 草白鳥 translates to grasshopper and though I signifcantly lack the cultural context to know what grasshopper symbology has in Japan, I do know in English you call someone a 'grasshopper' because they're tall. But why start with grass swan at all? Well- maybe it's a stretch for whatever fantasy time-period ISAT takes place in to use an internet term but, 草 has been used in internet slang to mean lol or haha since 'w' is also a version of lol or haha, and when spammed like so - wwwwwwwwwwwww - it looks like grass. The reason for swan would be because of I guess this idea of beauty? Less due to Odile specifically considering Isabeau beauty and more so taking note of his care to his appearance - whether it be how he presents his perception of his appearance or how he makes people belief a different thing about what his views about his appearance are, white swan or black swan - and that whatever the case is, he does take pride in maintaining that appearance; a retroactive meaning to the nickname, especially when Isa starts more casually bringing up the fact he *had* Changed, would be an incidental reference to the ugly duckling, who ended up not being a duckling at all and was a swan all along. Whether the nickname actually works or not I don't really know, but what it boils down to Odile's nickname for him (and thus Nokosu's only title for him beyond fighter) would really mean 'funny (tall) beauty' which would probably fluster Odile to admit it as Isa would hearing it.

An interesting thing I found while finding kanji for little crow (specifically 小烏) was that there is actually kind of already a word for it already, Kogarasu Maru or 小烏丸, AKA "Little Crow" which is a unique tachi sword rumoured to be crafted by a legendary swordsmith like-! I don't know if that was at all intentional on Insertdisc5's part (and if I should change the pronunciaton of the romaji version of the original text to kogarasu), but beyond Siffrin's little habit to collect every little thing that shines and doesn't, what do you mean there's a unique tachi sword named 'little crow' that's like literally so Siffrin-coded I SWEAR TO GOD!

Oh, and I played ISAT in Japanese to get the correct spelling of Vaugarde and 語 (go) is just the suffix for language AKA the difference between Nihon the country and Nihongo the language okay BYE!

#odile #odile isat #nokosu #in stars and time #isat #isat spoilers #isat act 6 spoilers #fanart #if i spent 8 hours drawing nokosu the first time- i spent hours explaining to y'all how i named one and how i wrote the japanese #aka a lot of translations but ones specifically informed by what little understanding i have of japanese which is barely anything really #stretching my 'making a japanese character name' muscles but not too far since i'm not using the kanji to make an actual human name #rather i'm using a term directly lifted from the dictionary since this isn't meant to be used as a human name #nokosu after the loops would certainly consider using a more human name #even if one uses the kanji present in izan which thankfully won't be hard to find thanks to the wonderful jisho.org who also has a names ta #which also defines the type of name from given to family even to place #anyway i'm a one post wonder let me give you odile and nokosu first meeting #the more i draw details of the favour tree the more i cook i think look at that fucking root oh my god

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