{"id":317,"date":"2006-04-12T18:04:40","date_gmt":"2006-04-12T23:04:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=317"},"modified":"2006-04-12T18:43:14","modified_gmt":"2006-04-12T23:43:14","slug":"sugar-note-to-saga","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=317","title":{"rendered":"Sugar: Note to Saga"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;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 <span class=spoiler>she writes on a treasured piece of sheet music that belonged to Saga&#8217;s deceased mother, so<\/span> Saga gets upset and doesn&#8217;t read the message right away.  She carries the paper around with her, and looks at it later, and yet she still doesn&#8217;t read it.  She&#8217;s old enough to read a message this short without any problem, just by glancing at it.  <\/p>\n<p><center><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"images\/salsf_message2.jpg\"\/><\/center><\/p>\n<p>Later she shows it to Salt and Pepper and they look right at it and read it to her.  They tell her it says <span class=spoiler>&#8221; Sorry Saga &#8220;<\/span>, which she should have been able to read herself.<\/p>\n<p><center><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"images\/salsf_message1.jpg\"\/><\/center><\/p>\n<p>I can only conclude that the only reason she didn&#8217;t read it is because she <em>couldn&#8217;t<\/em>, and the only reason for that is that it isn&#8217;t in her native language.<\/p>\n<p>Looking at the letters, they are not German (the story takes place in Germany, I think) or indeed any other European language.  They don&#8217;t look very Japanese, either.  In fact, they look kinda&#8230; made-up.  So, is it:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>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&#8217;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&#8217;t think they would glaze over a detail like this.\n<\/li>\n<li>A language I don&#8217;t recognize? I don&#8217;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&#8217;t supposed to examine it too closely.  In any case, this doesn&#8217;t explain why Saga couldn&#8217;t read it.\n<\/li>\n<li>A special made-up Fairy language? This would explain why Salt and Pepper could read it and Saga couldn&#8217;t. This seems most likely, but why would Sugar expect Saga to be able to read Fairy writing?\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>BUT: Then I get to disc 5 and Elder has a cookie for Ginger:<\/p>\n<p><center><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"images\/salsf_message3.jpg\"\/><\/center><\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;m sure I&#8217;m just reading to much into this, but I can&#8217;t help feeling like I&#8217;m missing something.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;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&#8217;s deceased mother, so Saga gets upset and doesn&#8217;t read the message right away. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anime"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=317"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}