Learning Japanese with Berserk: Falconia
Added 2022-06-21 18:17:31 +0000 UTCWith episode 236, as our group finds itself on the beach, the story began a new chapter called "Falconia". It was a big deal at the time for the enlightened among us because it gave us a key information about what to expect in the future: Griffith was going to get his own city.
How did we know that, though? Falconia could have just been his new eau de cologne. Well you guessed it, it's thanks to the kanji. In Japanese, Falconia is written 鷹都, with ファルコニア (FARUKONIA) added as furigana. Maybe you've recognized the first kanji (鷹), but if not, it means hawk/falcon and is commonly used in Berserk to refer to Griffith. Its pronunciation in Japanese is TAKA.
The second kanji (都) is a common one in Japanese. Among other things, you can find it at the end of 京都 (KYOUTO), Japan's former capital city. It can simply mean "city" when pronounced "TO", or capital city when used alone and pronounced "MIYAKO".
In this case, 鷹都 would have been TAKATO, but the furigana lets us know that it should really be Falconia. And to underline the preeminence of the furigana over the kanji, it suffices to recall that episode 307, where the city finally appears (and the chapter ends) is simply ファルコニア in Katakana, without any kanji.
Anyway, thanks to those kanji, we knew early on that we were going to see "The Falcon's city". And yet no one quite expected that it would appear the way that it did.
