Language is Weird!
Language is Weird!
or:
Shouting Across Many Waters
The new Wii U video game console from Nintendo has a start screen which depicts crowds of virtual characters gathering and conversing in virtual space. This virtual environment is called 'WaraWara Plaza', and Nintendo tells us this is a Japanese term meaning 'bustling' or 'busy'. Back in June we were given the following definition: "Mii WaraWara, taken from the Japanese's "warawara" (the sound of things happening, in Japanese)." and also "Developers called it the "Mii Wara wara." (Japanese onomatopoeia for general noise of a crowd.)"
http://kotaku.com/5958492/nintendo-adding-new-japanese-word-to-american-vocabulary-warawara
http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2012/11/nintendo_direct_wii_u_summary_released_by_noa
I love onomatopoeia, and I think this is appropriate, but Americans have expressed difficulty in pronouncing this imported term. But I find it VERY odd that Nintendo is working so hard to explain what they seem to think is a uniquely Japanese term. See, as a video editor I know better! The American term for artificial bustling crowd noise in sound editing is "Walla". When recording ADR (additional Dialog Recording) it's common to just repeat "walla" over and over to imitate crowd noise, although I've also heard "rhubarb" and "peas and carrots". You'll often hear about people hiring a "walla group" to come in and fake crowd noise in films.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walla
http://filmsound.org/terminology/walla.htm
So I'm convinced this is an example of Japan borrowing a term from English. I would translate the term for the Nintendo screen as "Walla Walla Plaza". Clearly they had some trouble with the "L" sound, and converted it accordingly. I've always heard that the editing term 'walla' was derived from the city name 'Walla Walla Washington'. That makes the double repetition of the name make perfect sense in English - whereas usually the odd repetitions in Japanese come off a little weird.
OK, so that all makes a kind of sense, more or less. Things get really weird if you ask how that city in America got named. That city was named after an indigenous American Indian tribe, and is supposed to translate to mean 'many waters'. Turns out even this explanation has a bit of controversy.
http://thehive.modbee.com/?q=node/6098
Powers himself believe that “wallie” came from the word wallim, meaning “down below,” which the Yosemite Indians (ed. Notes: Paiutes) “applied to the lower tribes with a slight feeling of contempt.” Powers noted that the Indians on the Stanislaus and Tuolumne used the term freely in conversing among themselves, (ed. Note; Possibly because they were talking about their tribe Walla Walla?) “but on the Merced it is not heard, except among Americans.” Power’s conclusions, while interesting, do not seem that persuasive.
A quick search through the most common words in the Mariposa and Tuolumne dialects, however, suggests only one word that resembles Perlot’s “oualai”, and that is oyea, which means “mean man” (Tuolumne: uyeayu). While the Mariposan word for earth, dirt, or world is walli, it seems to make no sense as a greeting. The Pomo word for the phrase “on both sides” is wa’li, Perlot used it as a greeting so often and so successfully that his friends jokingly called him “Mr. Oualai.”
So we have a long history where the term was being used in California at a time of rapid expansion in the States. It's funny to think the term was shouted when different cultures were trying to communicate on the same land where one day Hollywood editors would be using the term to describe faking communication in films. As an editor, I can use 'walla' to remove any actual language from a film soundtrack. Video games have always made extensive use of walla since using actual recorded speech is expensive and requires replacement for each language a game might be played in. Language is weird.