Re: The deliberate redundancy; was: Idioms

Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> even the words with o-, which made her giggle a little. Of
> course, he didn't know that, but I understand that hearing a man speaking
> like a woman must be somewhat weird. BTW, I know that in some tribes (of
> Australia I think), men and women speak entirely different dialects. To
> what extent does this exist in Japanese? Do differences between man-talking
> and woman-talking appear even in the lexicon and the syntax or only in some
> choices of particles (use of o-, of wa instead of yo as a terminal particle)?
What is BTW? My dictionary does not have it.

I don't think of grammatical differences specially between man and woman
in Japanese. o-, go-, -wa, -yo, these are occasionally used by both.
But -ze, -zo were used to be man's additions to sound like strong. Also
"ore", "washi", "boku" for "I" in English had never been used by woman,
and "atashi", "atai","uchi"were specially for woman. But now Manga and
animations made the custom messed up. Young girl students use men's
words and boys answer like women used to be. Crazy world seems to begin
over there now.

Dialects in Japan are much different between local areas. Even in
Kansai, Osaka, Kyoto, Nara, Kobe all are little bit diferent. When I
triped to the souther edge of Kyusyu island, I could get less than 50%
of their native talking in a train. Why this could be happen?

Japan was like the present U.S.A. in the ancient time. The land was one
of the richest for foods in the world located in the east end, so many
peoples came from everywhere. Then Japanese has many words for the same
or similar meaning originally. Also they closed the country for hundreds
years and peole were not allowed to move for living area freely. 70% of
the lands is mountains, so until about a handred years ago, it was
difficult to travel around for general people. As the result, much
variety of cultures and dialects were raised.

I made some example words for "I" above, but those are just a little.
You can find much more in many locations. Also time has changed words.
"o-mae" and "kisama"{ki=noble,sama=respective addition}(= you) were
polite and respective words for upper level people originally, but now
they use "omae" for very close friends or youger or lower people, and
"kisama" is for an enemy.

Yoshiko
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