21435


I've been watching Inuyasha with subtitles and in episode 6 and 7, Inuyasha
fights with his brother Sesshomaru about a sword. The English subtitle says
"Tetsusaiga" but they're clearly saying "てっさいが". Why are they subtitling it in
this way?


CC BY-SA 3.0
2015-05-09T12:33:21.703
21427
2022-01-22T03:22:47.977
2015-05-09T13:22:57.783
8134
9052
question
inuyasha
Why do the subtitles say "tetsusaiga" for "tessaiga"?


The reason why the subtitles don't match the dialog is apparently because Viz
wanted to be consistent with their earlier translation of the Inuyasha manga.
In the manga it's not at all clear that the sword should be named tessaiga
(てっさいが) instead of tetsusaiga (てつさいが). It's a made up name whose kanji (鉄砕牙)
could be pronounced either way. There's furigana in manga to show the author's
intent but it doesn't make the tsu character clearly smaller:

![Inuyasha manga excerpt with tessaiga/tetsusaiga
furigana](https://i.stack.imgur.com/fZyA8.jpg) ![Dialog bubble with
tessaiga/tetsusaiga furigana](https://i.stack.imgur.com/1JvDW.jpg)

I found the above pictures in a [Tumbler post](http://inu-
fanon.tumblr.com/post/64738304205/tetsusaiga-vs-tessaiga) that goes into more
details about the mix up.

It seems it wasn't until the release of the anime that Viz had any reason to
believe they were wrong, and I guess they decided it would be better to be
consistent with their manga translation than the Japanese audio.

(I have to say though that all this makes me wonder if the producers of the
anime version were just guessing as well.)


CC BY-SA 3.0
2015-05-10T00:19:29.087
21435
2015-05-10T00:19:29.087
7861
21427
answer


While it's tempting to chalk this up to a mistranslation by Viz, as [Ross
Ridge's answer](https://anime.stackexchange.com/a/21435) suggests (and that
Viz themselves might even admit to), I think if we take the question as
seriously as possible, the answer must be that both names are correct, at
least in writing.

The relevant background here is that Inuyasha takes place in the [Sengoku
period](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sengoku_period) roughly 500 years ago. So
Inuyasha's sword's name should be interpreted in the Japanese of the time, not
modern Japanese.

On the other hand, the use of っ in Japanese is a relatively modern invention.
The earliest known uses of it in this way occurred in the 19th century, and it
wasn't standardized until 1947. Prior to this, double consonants in Japanese
existed only as common slurs where only the consonant was pronounced. This
form of slurring _has_ existed for a long time, likely since the Sengoku
period. I suggest reading [this Japanese SE
question](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/751/how-did-little-tsu-
become-a-lengthener) for more information.

So, while 鉄砕牙 would have been written out as 「てつさいが」 in the classical Japanese
of the time (or possibly in several other ways, as _hiragana_ themselves were
not standardized until 1900 with the removal of
[_hentaigana_](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hentaigana)), it could plausibly
be pronounced as either 「てつさいが」 ( _tetsusaiga_ ) or 「てっさいが」 ( _tessaiga_ ) to
the modern Japanese ear. But the classical Japanese speaker would have
recognized these as the same word. Even this is something of a simplification,
as pronunciation of these syllables has shifted over time, but without having
audio records of Japanese from that time it's fairly difficult to know exactly
what shifts have occurred.

That is to say, while _tessaiga_ and _tetsusaiga_ sound rather different to
us, there isn't any distinction between the two in period Japanese writing, in
the same way that "sorta" is just a slurred version of "sort of" in English.
They're both valid romanizations of the same word, and so they're both really
the same name. In some sense, saying that either _tessaiga_ or _tetsusaiga_ is
correct is actually historically inaccurate. In modern Japanese, it's clear
that they say _tessaiga_ , but that doesn't really mean that _tetsusaiga_ is
an incorrect way of writing the name.

I guess the real reason for this confusion is that the text has gone through
so many different linguistic steps that it would necessarily end up being
somewhat confused. Of course the text is written in modern Japanese, but it's
supposed to be a modern interpretation of historical Japanese. In order to
romanize it, since there's no way to romanize classical Japanese, it first
needs to be converted back into modern Japanese, and then to roumaji (which
approximate Japanese pronunciation using latin alphabet characters). But the
conversion back to modern Japanese is ambiguous, and so both _tessaiga_ and
_tetsusaiga_ could be simultaneously valid.

With all that said, I don't think Inuyasha tries especially hard to stick to
historically accurate Japanese, so to some degree this is a moot point. I just
wanted to point out that, strictly speaking, in Sengoku-period Japanese, there
is no way to differentiate the two words. On the other hand, for practical
purposes, one can hear that the anime uses _tessaiga_ for pronunciation and
writes てっさいが as the furigana, so presumably this is the more understandable
choice in English.


CC BY-SA 3.0
2015-05-10T02:59:04.387
21437
2015-05-10T03:11:57.957
2017-04-13T12:54:48.523
-1
24
21427
answer