Nani mo Wakaranai - Vol. 1 Ch. 11 - Numbers and Letters

[MangaDex]

 

[zeronatsume]

love the concept of this manga

 

[mgRdr]

He's a village dioota

 

[lxmon_fax]

We can finally begin to start translating what’s been said in previous chapters now!

Thanks for the TL

 

[Celiohogane]

Dude running from a boar despite the first thing he has ever done was failing to stab himself because his skin was too hard to slice is... interesting.

 

[pip25]

"Fewer letters than I imagined" - for a 57-letter alphabet. He's Japanese alright. XP

 

[mrboxeater]

her sixth sense kicked in and she smacked him for being a stupid weeb lmao.

 

[BoodaAppreciator]

That villager girl is cute.
Very nice to see the language gap might possibly be bridged at some point, but baby steps for now.

 

[LuckyNChance]

I enjoy this slow methodical premise.

 

[chrno_12]

Thanks for the translation!

 

[Fmarulz]

I think it’s just a coincidence but dioota sounds close to idiota and that’s idiot in Spanish.
I might be stretching it a bit but I like to think it is intentional haha

 

[Maqre]

"Fewer letters than I imagined" - for a 57-letter alphabet. He's Japanese alright. XP

It's not an alphabet, it's a syllabary, just like Japanese kana. Which could tell us a lot about the world he's in if the author put some thought into the worldbuilding, since syllabaries are extremely rare on modern day Earth and Japanese is the only major world language that has syllabic writing.

Or it could also just be the author being lazy about the language he created by making it similar-ish to Japanese, who knows.

 

[number42]

The last page seems to be from the next chapter, right? Anyways, thanks for the translation!
Interesting to see that myaa-neese uses a base 10 system and is also a syllabary (as noted by other commenters). Maybe it's just easy worldbuilding (for a japanese author), but it could be something else!

 

[urtoast]

Too soon to give up on the game theory, at least until he learns the language well enough to attempt commands in the local tongue.

 

[Thufiel16]

Now i need the version of myaa-san where she end her word with "desu wa"

 

[nisor]

The last page seems to be from the next chapter, right? Anyways, thanks for the translation!
Interesting to see that myaa-neese uses a base 10 system and is also a syllabary (as noted by other commenters). Maybe it's just easy worldbuilding (for a japanese author), but it could be something else!

Whoops, you are actually right regarding the last page. I doubled checked the table of contents and it seems to be the case. Now to go back and fix the other chapters... Thanks for bringing it up!

 

[omatic]

Whoops, you are actually right regarding the last page. I doubled checked the table of contents and it seems to be the case. Now to go back and fix the other chapters... Thanks for bringing it up!

I've watched so many shows that start with "Previously, on [Series]...", I didn't even think much of it!

 

[Lunkli]

I'm interested in that left-most column. The rest are all pretty simple C + V syllables, plus a couple sound changes, but that one's a bit of a mess. Comparing the appearance of the characters, they almost look like unmodified versions of the consistent parts of the characters of each row? (As in, each character in each row, for the most part, appears to be a modification of the left-most character.) Maybe they're actually isolated consonants and the pronunciations he's written are just their names rather than their sound? Or the names of each "row?"

Them being names of some sort actually seems to be pretty likely, as each one can be made up of other sounds in the table, (Taking into account some vowel length changes, as it doesn't really seem like vowel length is phonemic in their language.) with the exception of the two that use what I assume is "wo," (written as "uo") and "yoi" but those could just be the result of some sort of sound change. (Or Ryouta could be transliterating them incorrectly.)

The fact that there seem to be four logographic characters is interesting to. We know that "imu" and "oupu" are "yes" and "no," respectively, but it definitely seems to support the idea that "sui" is an important grammatical particle rather than just a normal word. "Yamu" being special is a bit of a surprise, though, honestly. The main place I remember seeing it was when she was giving her name, "mi yamu tuu." My original guess was that it was the word for "name," but I guess that's probably not it, huh? (Based on this chapter, I might actually say that that's "mejii," due to the panel where the chief asks for Ryouta's name.)

So I'm not really sure what "yamu" is. Some sort of particle, I'd bet, but I'm not sure what it would do. Maybe it's just a part of names? Like germanic "von" or "van" and stuff. (The fact that Myaa was fine with his nickname for her being partly derived from it (Myaa = mi + ya(mu)) might suggest this to be the case... After all, it'd be weird if you said "My name is John" and someone started calling you "Isjo" or something, right?)

Maybe it's like "of" and is being used in her name to mark which tribe she's from or something? We'd have to hear someone else's name to confirm that, though. Like, if the chief says his name is "Ha yamu tuu" or "mi yamu hee" then that's probably it. (With whichever side is the same as Myaa's being the tribe. In this case, I'm betting on it being the side after the yamu, due to "Myaa" using the side before and, again, being an acceptable nickname.)

Also, I doubt that that's actually their whole script, as it clearly can't account for their language's whole phonology, (It's impossible to write the pronunciations of numbers without using their designated characters!) and, as the end of the chapter shows, Myaa used extra characters when transliterating the hiragana he showed them. Those characters, specifically, seem like they're probably alphabetic, based on the fact that each syllable seems to have two distinct characters, with the Y syllables all having the same first character and the two O syllables we see having the same second character.

I suppose my guess would be that the roughly syllabic chart of characters she showed him are the native sounds in their language, while the letters she uses to transliterate his Japanese are characters that exist to write sounds that exist solely in loanwords. (The style of these letters is much less fluid than the native letters, perhaps implying that they have a different source.)

This would imply that the numbers are loanwords, as they use the extended loanword phonology rather than the native word phonology, which wouldn't actually be that odd. These people seem to be fairly early in their development, and early forms of languages quite famously have very few number words, often only "one" and "two." (This is why English, for example, has the words "first" and "second," which aren't derived from the words "one" and "two," followed by "fourth," "fifth," "sixth," &c., which are all obviously "four," "five," and "six" + a dental suffix "-th.")

We know that there's some sort of more technologically developed civilization around here, (considering all the anachronisms, like the "battery," the metal knife, the magic wand, &c.) so these people's numbers were probably taught to them by people from that civilization. Thus making them loanwords. Being loanwords also explains why they have specifically "ra" (or "la") and "ya" with no other R or Y syllables in their language, an oddity Ryouta took note of in ch3.

Honestly, it is really cool how the author has thought this language through enough to include details that can lead to conclusions like this. I really like how they're not just going for the typically Caesar cipher system of making a "language" for a story.

Oh, and something else I briefly considered regarding the numbers' characters is that they might actually just be normal syllabic characters, like the rest of the chart, just used in a form of gematria, (Like Greek or Hebrew.) and that Myaa just didn't include them on her chart because he already learned them from the chief. This is seeming a bit unlikely now, though, as I feel like the loanword theory makes more sense, plus I feel like there'd have had to be a few empty spaces on the chart for these characters.

Anyways, for the translator, regarding the number chart, うぉ is a fairly common way of transcribing the syllable "wo" such that it is unambiguously pronounced "wo" rather than "o." So that "5," for example, should probably be romanized as "woto" rather than "uoto." (I would say to use the provided romanization, but while they did give those for the numbers, apparently they didn't for the rest of the language! I think it's best to keep things consistent.) The phonology for this language is simple enough that I doubt this distinction matters very much, but it might be something to keep in mind, just in case.

 

[Chuito]

I love the little character building of the elf girl just choosing to call him Ryu while being fully aware of his actual name.

When someone else asks his name she gives the proper answer, yet still calls him Ryu regardless. I wonder if she simply finds it easier to say or just is that type of friendly girl.

 

[cryum]

Whenever we have this type of language study, I always find it odd that the MC doesn't get down to business writing down an addition and multiplication table.

Presenting mathematical concepts communicates a lot of ideas with fairly few symbols