Re: first lang test

On Thu, 8 Feb 2001, Nik Taylor wrote:

> Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
> > BTW, E-Ching, thanks for that tidbit!  Interesting indeed...I hadn't
> > thought of the possibility of Japanese pronoun usage being affected by
> > fads, though with the school-age set it would make a certain amount of
> > sense....
>
> Why not?  The pronoun system itself has undergone many changes over the
> centuries.  Pronouns become gradually less respectful, until they're
> abandoned, and new pronouns are invented as respectful pronouns.
> "Boku", for one, originally meant "servant", and was a very humble way
> of saying "I", that was about a century ago.  Today, it can only be used
> in informal (IIRC) settings.
Oh, definitely--it's that I'd never sat down and thought about it before,
and I personally haven't "seen" pronoun change happen that I can recall.
There are all sorts of things that would be obvious or at least sensible
if I ever thought about them, but I'm too scatterbrained to actually have
thought about them.  :-p

YHL