I did mean Japanese, but I didn't mean that either they or the French literally say "bro"; that was just the 'street' translation being given in the studies I was looking at concerning the use of mon frère as a form of address by modern inner-city French youth.
For all I know modern Japanese *does* include the syllable "bro" in the way that it (apparently) uses traditional honorifics -- my knowledge of Japanese is entirely at second-hand from hearing other people complaining about anime fanfics. But what I was trying to say was that I've heard people complaining about fanfic using 'Little Brother' as a form of direct address, and that this was presumably as normal in Japanese as the corresponding form is in 19th-century French... and which happens to sound stilted in English, where it's *not* the custom.
My guess, as a complete non-Japanese-speaker, would be that this 'friendly-brother-suffix' (going by my knowledge of Japanese as a syllabic language with appended honorifics) is probably being added to the ends of characters' names in the original Japanese in order to indicate an honorary relationship, and that the English dub is trying to emulate this by inserting the syllable 'bro' into their names. Which is quite ingenious as a way of translating the untranslatable, if true.
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momijizukamori
no subject
Date: 2020-12-13 09:52 pm (UTC)For all I know modern Japanese *does* include the syllable "bro" in the way that it (apparently) uses traditional honorifics -- my knowledge of Japanese is entirely at second-hand from hearing other people complaining about anime fanfics. But what I was trying to say was that I've heard people complaining about fanfic using 'Little Brother' as a form of direct address, and that this was presumably as normal in Japanese as the corresponding form is in 19th-century French... and which happens to sound stilted in English, where it's *not* the custom.
My guess, as a complete non-Japanese-speaker, would be that this 'friendly-brother-suffix' (going by my knowledge of Japanese as a syllabic language with appended honorifics) is probably being added to the ends of characters' names in the original Japanese in order to indicate an honorary relationship, and that the English dub is trying to emulate this by inserting the syllable 'bro' into their names. Which is quite ingenious as a way of translating the untranslatable, if true.
But that is a complete stab in the dark!