Untranslatable nuanses

5 comments

1. *Nuances

2. Personally I find just detecting sentence boundaries to be hard / ambiguous in Japanese music. There’s also particle choice and appenthesis (tagging subjects on at the end) that make Japanese nuanced in songs and in normal writing/speech.

   Then of course there’s formal speech vs casual — why is this song in formal desu/masu terms: [https://lyricstranslate.com/en/tobimasu-flying.html](https://lyricstranslate.com/en/tobimasu-flying.html)

   Maybe because it’s an announcement / statement of intention. Certainly it matters to Japanese speakers and wouldn’t be the same with casual speech, which is more usual for songs.

3. isn’t there also female artists using 僕(ぼく)？ bc i though 僕 was tied mainly to referring to yourself as a (typically young) male

4. > Does anyone know of a song where maybe a female singer used “ore” or a male singer used “atashi” to convey a message?

   This was pretty common during the folk boom in the 1970s, since folk singers tended to sing from the point of view of a character rather than from their own perspective. First-person pronouns and other dialect cues were a popular way for songwriters to convey information about a character.

   For example, [Puka Puka by Nishioka Kyozo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKxQWxOtgNI) switches back and forth between being sung from the perspective of a male and female character, and the first-person pronoun shifts between “ore” and “atai” to let listeners know who’s talking.

   Another example is [Asakawa Maki’s Kamome](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX9OcVK6ua4) in which Asakawa is singing from the perspective of a sailor who spends his nights in smoke-filled bars by the harbor. The pronoun “oira” being the first word of the lyrics lets the listener know that Asakawa is singing from the perspective of a male character.

   There are a lot of examples of this kind of thing, those are just two that come to mind.

5. Not sure if that’s what you’re looking for, but words often have special readings in songs. The song sounds perfectly normal, but then you go to karaoke and discover that some words are written with characters for other words or a word is written in kanji but read in English instead of Japanese.
   Can’t remember the songs now, but I noticed that quite a few times.