(If this question is better-suited to GQ, go ahead and move it)
I just watched a Korean movie, “The Pirates: The Last Royal Treasure” on Netflix. I was watching it with the dialogue dubbed in English, since I don’t speak Korean.
In one scene, the male and female leads are having a conversation, and the male makes some reference to tigers, in which he says “tiger” twice. Not consecutively, like “tiger tiger”; the word appeared in two separate phrases.
The female lead replied with something like, “Please don’t say the ‘-ger’ part of ‘tiger’ in front of me again.”
Her statement made absolutely no sense in English, so I’m left guessing that it was some kind of pun/joke in the original Korean that simply didn’t translate into English.
Any Korean speakers here who might have an idea what that was all about?
Can you post where in the film that conversation occurs?
My best guess after checking Wikipedia about the flick is that Hae-rang (해랑) doesn’t want to hear the male character saying her personal name. 호랑이 (ho-rang-ee) means tiger.
I can check with my wife after work tonight to see if my guess is correct, provided she’s seen the movie.
Okay, that makes some sense, in context of what happens later in the film.
Hae-rang is the captain of the pirate ship. A crew member figures out where the treasure is hidden, and how to get there, but he won’t tell unless he’s made captain. So Hae-rang steps down temporarily. While she is not the captain, the male lead (and I think the other crewmen) just call her “Rang”.
That supports my guess. “Ho-rang-ee” minus “Ho” is “Rang-ee”. The “ee” suffix can be used after the name of a child akin to the ~y/~ie suffix in English. I can see she’d rather not have the male lead calling her “Rang-ee”. And she’d rather be seen as a tiger instead of a little girl.