Comments on: Ode to っ

By: Galang Rambu Anarki

Galang Rambu Anarki — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 12:45:42 +0000

I watch my old black-and-white Japanese DVDs with the (Japanese) subtitles on, because owing to the inadequacies of my education I still find a flickering barrage of Japanese script is often easier to catch than full-on, full-speed, fifty-year-old dialogue. In the Ozu film I watched last night, I soon lost count of the number of times the dialogue was rendered with a ‘chiisai tsu’ where we would use an exclamation point in English.

I even got to use a chiisai tsu myself this morning, when towards the end of a tedious meeting my new boss asked me out of the blue to stand up and address the amassed throng of my co-workers, just as I was nodding off to fantasies of beer, beaches, and buxom blondes. あっ、そうですか？

By: Daniel

Daniel — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 23:37:54 +0000

I’d forgotten how universal that first-gulp うまっ! is. When I was up in Aizu, just about the whole table did some kind of っ-based expression after the first sip of beer.

This also gives me a chance to link to a video that has my favorite English drawn-out vowel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30YW3wgRvyI

By: Jimmy Tong and his Hong Kong Five

Jimmy Tong and his Hong Kong Five — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 11:47:40 +0000

One further use of the chiisai tsu that doesn’t seem to get mentioned here or in the Tokyo Damage Report: it often marks the slight glottal catch heard in spoken Japanese at the end of exclamations, both after non-verbal sounds like おっ (doh!), あっ (ah!), and えっ？(what the?), and in the exclamatory shortened (no i-ending) forms of adjectives like　いたっ! (ouch!),　あつっ! (shit, that’s hot),　or うまっ! (damn that tastes good).

In this sense, it acts something like an exclamation point in English — which (interesting enough), also occurs after true onomatopoeia such as Bang! Boom! Plop! and Whizz!

Just get used to it.