[Fish Sandwich]

Quote:

Originally Posted by gashatfreak

Can someone please explain to me what 'Aruto ja naito' translates to?

You've gotten a lot of very conflicting responses to this question already, many of which aren't entirely correct, so forgive me in advance if I make my own mistakes while throwing my own attempt on the pile.

The key points here:

- yes, it is a pun, based on aru and nai having opposing meanings.
- it is *also* a completely normal sentence even if you completely disregard the pun.

The thing I think the other responses here have missed is how critical that to at the end is. I can't at all explain this academically since I didn't learn Japanese from a class, but basically, it's like a conjunction linking to an implied back half of the sentence. If you had a sentence like "アルトじゃないと_____", it would be translated along the lines of "If it's not Aruto, ____", so it's like saying "Nobody but Aruto could (tell a joke this funny!)", more or less. Therefore, Over-Time's "That's how you know it's Aruto!", TV-Nihon's "Gotta have Aruto!", and Shout's "That was a work of Aruto!" all actually get fairly close to the proper meaning of the phrase. It is very much Aruto's way of making it known how one of a kind his sense of humor is.

I feel like I'm probably making this sound more elaborate than it is with my poor explanation, but basically, there are a ton of ways to end a sentence in Japanese like that to convey the meaning of something that *has* to be, or *must* be done or whatever. If I wanted to say "I have to study", for example, I could say "勉強しないと", (benkyou shinai to). And maybe if I did study, I'd be conveying this way better!

Hopefully this helped!