T w e n t y S i d e d
I’m thinking back to disc 2 of Sugar, A Little Snow Fairy. In one episode, Sugar writes a message in crayon for Saga and shows it to her. But she writes on a treasured piece of sheet music that belonged to Saga’s deceased mother, so Saga gets upset and doesn’t read the message right away. She carries the paper around with her, and looks at it later, and yet she still doesn’t read it. She’s old enough to read a message this short without any problem, just by glancing at it.
Later she shows it to Salt and Pepper and they look right at it and read it to her. They tell her it says ” Sorry Saga “, which she should have been able to read herself.
I can only conclude that the only reason she didn’t read it is because she couldn’t, and the only reason for that is that it isn’t in her native language.
Looking at the letters, they are not German (the story takes place in Germany, I think) or indeed any other European language. They don’t look very Japanese, either. In fact, they look kinda… made-up. So, is it:
- A pretend European language, or faux-German? (Like the way Americans might make fake Japanese by drawing squiggles that look Japanese to them.) Unlikely. It shouldn’t have been hard for the animators to translate a two-word message into German. They went all the way to Germany to do research for the series, so I don’t think they would glaze over a detail like this.
- A language I don’t recognize? I don’t think so. The language looks quite pictographic, but it also looks much too long for the information it contains. Also, the message seems to change shape a bit and is always partly obscured, so I expect we aren’t supposed to examine it too closely. In any case, this doesn’t explain why Saga couldn’t read it.
- A special made-up Fairy language? This would explain why Salt and Pepper could read it and Saga couldn’t. This seems most likely, but why would Sugar expect Saga to be able to read Fairy writing?
BUT: Then I get to disc 5 and Elder has a cookie for Ginger:
So what we have are characters who live in Germany, speak Japanese, and write in gibberish on paper but use English when writing on cookies. I’m sure I’m just reading to much into this, but I can’t help feeling like I’m missing something.
