>>> Item number 14256 from WRITERS LOG9306D --- (71 records) ----- <<< Date: Fri, 25 Jun 1993 17:00:05 JST Reply-To: WRITERS Sender: WRITERS From: Mike Barker Subject: FILLER: A Japanese WOTD Obatarian (pronounced OH-bah-tah-ree-ahn) is an interesting case of linguistic development. It basically means old woman (with something of the flavor of "little old ladies in tennis shoes" - likely to bop you with their bag if you get out of line). Start with oba-san (aunt or middle-aged woman) or maybe obaa-san (grandmother or old woman). [there's a topic for a cross-cultural thesis in the use of words for relatives in reference to unrelated folks, but that's another discussion] Although somewhat informal (and impolite if you stretch the vowel), many Japanese do refer to almost all older women as oba-san. (A very common joke is made of whether someone said oba-san or obaa-san). Linguistic Sidelight: Normal japanese speech has a regular enough "beat" that they can distinguish a double-length vowel from a single-length vowel, even though foreigners like myself find this very hard to do (even after spending time practicing with a metronome, trying in vain to impose regular-length phonemes on my speaking, and hours spent listening to paired terms, trying to hear the difference). Now back to the main beam... Add in the very popular American movie of a few years ago - Battalion. You probably don't know it by that name. In America, it was called "Night of the Living Dead" (short plot summary - the sealed barrels containing the "Living Dead" which cannot be killed get cracked, and it escapes; but, our heroes manage to cremate the "Living Dead"; unfortunately, this merely distributes the essence over town.. and times get rough) You remember - marching zombies and more marching zombies... This was an extremely popular movie in Japan (don't ask me why, I really don't understand it either). Someone, taking note of the resemblance between "oba" and "batarian" as pronounced here, put them together as a term to refer to those wonderful aged ladies who knock you down with their shopping bags, etc. Some people have suggested that the visual resemblance of our older ladies and the zombies in the movie had something to do with the creation of the term, but I refuse to credit this rumor. A cartoonist took up the term and produced a line of popular books (manga - comics) describing identifying marks of the obatarian, life around the obatarian, etc. Quite funny - I think my wife has the first five volumes? I can even understand some of the humor. So - the resulting word, in wide-spread use now in Japan, is the marriage of the Japanese word for aunt, culturally used for most any older woman, with an English word used as the local title for a foreign movie. The usage was spread by comic books. And people think English has some odd derivations. I can't wait to see the write-ups in Beth's dictionaries in about a hundred years after this term manages to migrate back to America... of course, by then I may be one of the living dead! what does this have to do with writing? not much, but maybe.. anyone up for the title "My Dear Aunt Zombie"? have a good weekend, you all! mike [BTW - jane (and anyone else who wants to heckle), I think most of you can send me mail at barker%aegis.or.jp@ndsuvm1.bitnet or barker%aegis.or.jp@vm1.nodak.edu - thanks to the absent jc for working this out...]