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Could also be from German, although this would also be written ne instead of neh. People from the northern part of Germany use this in pretty much the same way
by blywi 12y ago
Could also be from German, although this would also be written ne instead of neh.
People from the northern part of Germany use this in pretty much the same way it is used in Japanese (at least according to what I know with my limited knowledge of Japanese)
I always thought of this as a strange quirk that the same language construct can evolve in two unrelated languages.
It's just like parallel evolution in biology.
- schoen 12y agoThere's also Brazilian Portuguese "né", which is an end-of-sentence tag with exactly the same meaning. It's a contraction of "não é" ('isn't it') and is used in a way akin to German "nicht wahr".
- weinzierl 12y agoAlso "isso" which in German is colloquial for "Ist so" and means "That's it" or "Exactly". When in Brazil I always found it funny that they use "isso", short for "isso mesmo", in much the same way.
- schoen 12y agoIt's funny to think that the conversation fragment - ... Né? - Isso. could happen in either Brazil or Germany with the same meaning. :-)
- kevin_thibedeau 12y agoCould this have been influenced by the Japanese colonists in the São Paulo region?
- Yen 12y agoWhich, incidentally, is almost certainly where the usage in Ender's Game comes from. The author (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orson_Scott_Card http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orson_Scott_Card) spent two years in Brazil on a religious mission, and there's multiple other Portuguese references in that book. (This influence is even stronger in "Ender's Game"'s sequel, "Speaker for the Dead")
- csours 12y agoInterestingly, there's also the Yiddish: nu? Which itself likely comes from German or Russian
- darklajid 12y agoThat's also used in (and often a reference when making fun of..) the dialect in Saxony.
- aselzer 12y agoIt's funny that "gel", which you hear pretty often in Austria (and probably South Germany), means the same as well. It's approximately the same as "nicht wahr?", or "oder?", which can't really be translated, but suggest wanting some kind of verification for what was said.
- EvaK_de 12y agoSince I'm German, this is probably at least the reason why I found it so easy to accept this construct, when I stumbled upon it in Ender's Game. It just felt natural, so my brain decided to use it in English, too. :)