Whaaaa?
If you’ve spent any time hanging out with those, shall we say, enthusiastic about the Japanese language, especially those who have arrived at this enthusiasm because of (or along with) a fervent interest in popular Japanese visual arts (anime especially, but manga as well), then no doubt you’ve also encountered the occasional insertion of a Japanese word into otherwise English discourse. And among these words, I would bet that nani (何) up there in the high-frequency ones. It’s probably not as frequent as the the SFP ne, nor as common as predicators like sugoi ‘awesome,’ or whole utterances like kakatte koi! temee koroshite yaru ze! ‘Bring it on! I’ll kill you, you f*ing bastard!’
So, what does nani mean? Well, basically it’s basically the interrogative pronoun ‘what.’ But what I’m interested in are the interjective uses of ‘what,’ where it stands alone as an utterance, because this is the most often occurring use of the word in English discourse that I’ve seen. (There is the more conventional use, which is not that interesting to consider: Guess what I bought yesterday! — nani?) The American Heritage gives this definition:
Used to express surprise, incredulity, or other strong and sudden excitement.
Reasonable, but it doesn’t cover nearly all the uses of interjection-what, nor does it really describe in enough detail what the uses it does cover mean. As for expressing surprise or incredulity, this is probably what they mean: I won the lottery! — What?! (though I dare you to get the incredulity meaning without the surprise part). As for “other strong or sudden excitement”: what the heck does that mean? Can I use it when I’ve walked into my home to discover all my friends there, yelling Happy birthday? Well, maybe I should try that next time. Until then, I’ll list some other uses:
- requesting the addressee repeat a non-interpretable utterance. *indistinct mumbling* — What?
- (with a full interrogative sentence) expressing surprise, disgust, disbelief. What, are you just gonna walk up and ask her to give you a better grade?
- (rudely) inquire as to someone’s business. Uh…are you the manager? — What!?
And the list goes on and on…and then it stops, at some point. Now, as many language learners are wont to do, those who insist upon using the odd Japanese word often assume that Japanese interjection nani has the same range of meanings and discourse uses as does English what. Big mistake. Japanese nani, as a standalone:
- does not have the what did you just say meaning
- has the disgust/disbelief use with interrogatives, but is slightly degraded in that use
- has the what do you want use, but without (strong) overtones of rudeness or impatience
That’s important to keep in mind, I’d say. But, you might ask, what do they use in place of the English uses that are lacking for the standalone interjection? Well, they use what the Japanese often do when faced with the task of emphasizing: they complementize. By that, I mean they use the quotative marker to or te. So ‘what did you (just) say,’ can be rendered as （え）（今）なんて（言った） ‘(huh?) (now) what (did (you) say)?’ If you want to add a meaning of incredulity, anger or disgust, and perhaps tack on your own rhetorical question, you can use なんだと（バカにしよって）, which has the copula within the scope of the quotative marker.
And, contrary to what some (= I) may have read, standalone nani, when accompanied by a gesture indicating some physical object, does not mean ‘what is that?’ It means…well, it’s gibberish, though understandable. (Instead, use the obvious: これ・それはなに？ Or, switch it up to indicate some strong emotion that I can’t put a name to: なんだ、これ)
Not that there’s anything wrong with a little playful code-switching, ne?