Tenser, said the Tensor: Take on Me
Does this post have a “Linguistics” tag on it? I guess I should add some linguistic content. When I saw the words printed out on the screen, it struck me for the first time that the title of the song isn’t a very natural-sounding English sentence. Here’s what I mean. English phrasal verbs that take direct objects like take on have the property that the object can appear either before or after the particle. That means the following are both good sentences:
(1) We’ll take some new employees on
(2) We’ll take on some new employees
It’s a little bit different with pronouns, though—if a phrasal verb has a pronoun as its direct object, the pronoun must come before the particle. Otherwise it sounds wrong (to my ear):
(3) We’ll take them on
(4) * We’ll take on them
My two cents on this is that I recall hearing several J-Pop songs that incorporate “Take on me” as an untranslated bit of English, which is quite common in J-Pop. A quick Google turns up i ~crossin’ the star~, and CHUUZU MII (themselves bits of untranslated English), as well as a cover by Utada Hikaru. I assume that wherever it turns up it’s a quote of the a-ha song, since as the Tensor points out it’s not natural-sounding English, but I wonder if the Japanese lyricists understand that it’s odd. I have the (probably incorrect) impression that it’s being used as if it meant something like “Stop and look at me”, though I can’t point out a specific song, just a vague recollection of some anime theme.