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Comment by EvaK_de | Hacker News Reader

Should be reflected in the title, if possible, neh?

Cool example, but I think "ne" is the "correct" way to romanize ね.

If it's intended to be a romanization of ね, then yes, "ne" is more common. Alternatively it could be a reference to Ender's Game, where "neh" is used in the same way.

Thanks for bringing back to my mind where I snatched this one up! Yep, it's Ender's Game. :)

What is the meaning of the Chinese (?) symbol?

It's a japanese character (from hiragana script), and AFAIK used like this it means something like "isn't it?"/"shouldn't it?".

http://enwp.org/ね

It's a Japanese sentence ending, used to seek agreement/confirmation. Similar to "right?" or "isn't it?" in English.

The Chinese sentence ending is 呢 (ne in Mandarin), it would be interesting to know if that's related.

(I've just started learning Mandarin, and enjoy looking at the origin of words and characters.)

"Innit" is slang in Britain, used at the end of a sentence. It doesn't have to mean "isn't it", but could be "aren't you", "won't you" etc.

Japanese; you put it on the end of a statement to make it a question instead, e.g. "the server is up to date, ne?" to mean "is the server up to date?"

That's incorrect, that interrogation particle (for making the question in your example) is か. ね is different.

ね is the colloquial way of turning a statement into a question.

Could also be from German, although this would also be written ne instead of neh. People from the northern part of Germany use this in pretty much the same way it is used in Japanese (at least according to what I know with my limited knowledge of Japanese) I always thought of this as a strange quirk that the same language construct can evolve in two unrelated languages. It's just like parallel evolution in biology.

There's also Brazilian Portuguese "né", which is an end-of-sentence tag with exactly the same meaning. It's a contraction of "não é" ('isn't it') and is used in a way akin to German "nicht wahr".

Also "isso" which in German is colloquial for "Ist so" and means "That's it" or "Exactly". When in Brazil I always found it funny that they use "isso", short for "isso mesmo", in much the same way.

It's funny to think that the conversation fragment

- ... Né?

- Isso.

could happen in either Brazil or Germany with the same meaning. :-)

Could this have been influenced by the Japanese colonists in the São Paulo region?

Which, incidentally, is almost certainly where the usage in Ender's Game comes from.

The author (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orson_Scott_Card) spent two years in Brazil on a religious mission, and there's multiple other Portuguese references in that book.

(This influence is even stronger in "Ender's Game"'s sequel, "Speaker for the Dead")

Interestingly, there's also the Yiddish: nu? Which itself likely comes from German or Russian

That's also used in (and often a reference when making fun of..) the dialect in Saxony.

It's funny that "gel", which you hear pretty often in Austria (and probably South Germany), means the same as well.

It's approximately the same as "nicht wahr?", or "oder?", which can't really be translated, but suggest wanting some kind of verification for what was said.

Since I'm German, this is probably at least the reason why I found it so easy to accept this construct, when I stumbled upon it in Ender's Game. It just felt natural, so my brain decided to use it in English, too. :)

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