assuming this is japanese
Ie, Kurisumasu Taimu.
what does it mean
It’s not Japanese. Well, it is, but it isn’t. It’s a Japanese pronunciation of English words.
“Ie” means “no”.
And “Kurisumasu Taimu” means “Christmastime”. Really. Say it out loud.
It would appear to translate to “No, Christmas time”, with ie being Japanese for “no”, and Kurisumasu Taimu being a phonetic representation of the English phrase “Christmas time”.
makes sense to me as she is coming home at christmas time. thank you!
You got it mostly right but not quite.
Ie does not mean “no”. You’re probably confusing with iie. But iie does not mean “no” in the English sense either.
Ie means “house”. So you’d have something like “home, on Christmas time.”
In any case, what you have isn’t terribly correct, gramatically, so I’m assuming that either it’s been taken out of a broader context, or it was printed on stationary.
It’s a bit of a WAG, but I’m more inclined to think that it was actually iie, but the writer made a mistake with their romaji. I’m guessing so just because ‘ie, kurisumasu taimu’ is not only gramatically incorrect, it doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that would be used even in casual Japanese. That and because in my experience most Japanese don’t really understand the various systems for romaji well.
BTW, how would you translate ‘iie’?
“No.” “It’s nothing.”
Which would seem to contradict what I wrote, but it doesn’t really. Iie and “no” aren’t equivalent because Japanese doesn’t have a concept that corresponds to the English “no”. That’s what I meant when I said Iie doesn’t mean “no”.
Then what does it mean?
The Japanese don’t have a concept that corresponds to no? I’m afraid that I’m having difficulty accepting that. Iie seems to cover the concept pretty well, at least in terms of the ‘negative response’ meaning that we’re dealing with here.
The Koujien definition of iie also seems to support that :
My translation of that would be :
You wouldn’t agree that that’s ‘no’? Or are you arguing that the Japanese don’t have a ‘no’ because they don’t use iie in phrases such as ‘There are no girls in my class’?
In part, yes, but also because in practice, the usage of “no” and “iie” are very different.
“Yes” and “no” form a pair of perfect antomyms. Any question that can be answered by “yes” can also be answered by “no”, gramatically and stylistically speaking.
From the point of view of style, at the very least, that is not the case in Japanese. The frequency of usage of “hai” and “iie” are radically different. It doesn’t prove much, but a Google search for “hai” returns 3,620,000 hits and “iie”, 387,000. Now, not all “hai” hits are in the sense of “yes”, but still, there is a difference.
My point, essentially is that “iie” can usually be more or less accurately translated as “no”, but “no” is usually not best translated as “iie”. “Iie” is merely one of several ways to answer a question negatively.
The reason I draw this distinction is that over-use of “iie” is one of the most obvious symptoms of bad foreigner speach. One of the reasons, imo, is that it is often wrongly taught as the opposite to “hai”.
But still, I’ll admit that my first post was a minor brain fart.
In support of jovan’s comments, I agree that there are many instances where the given English translation of a Japanese word or phrase is not an exact equivalent, because there is no exact equivalent. Take the case of the common phrase ‘ohayogazaimasu’ which is usually translated as ‘good morning’ in English. Japanese people will sometimes greet each other with this phrase even in the afternoon or evening if it’s the first time they have seen them that day. As such, I don’t think that you can say it is an exact equivalent to the English phrase ‘good morning’.
Okay, I think I understand what you’ve been trying to say. I would suggest, though, that over-use of iie is not so much because it is taught as an opposite to hai, but rather because the other ways of responding (other than uun) require a higher level of Japanese ability.