Re: The deliberate redundancy; was: Idioms

Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>  My Japanese explained such a strange behaviour refering
> to the idea of respect. When talking of somebody's relative, you must
> respect this person, and thus indirectly respect the person you're talking
> to, so you use respectful words. In the same way, when talking to your
> father or mother, you must respect him/her, thus you must use respectful
> words when calling him/her.
You made a good reseach. One more hint to understand Japanese is:
"o" on the head of a word and "san" in the end of a name are both for
expressing respect and politeness.

Also "haha" and "kaa" in "o-kaa-san" are shown by the same Kanji
character. "haha" is read by old Chinese style and "o-kaa-san" was
developed from ancient Japanese word. Usually for formal occasion,
traditionally Japanese used Chinese style to read Kanji.

Korean never read Kanji using their own tongue, but Japanese did. So
they have plural ways to read a Kanji in Japan.
 Not only if it's traditional Japanese or Chinese, the reading sometimes
distinguishs from where or for what they imported the Kanji words. For
the imported words from America or Europe, they use Katakana. So if you
get used to it( I bet it's very hard to you), you can guess some of the
talker's backgroud by his choice of words.

Not much recently, but once ladies liked to put "o" for many words,
especially Osaka ladies. Even now they say "o-toufu" for Toufu, "o-kome"
for rice, "o-sakana" for fish, they respect FOOD! Even they say
"o-toile" or "go-fujou" for toilet (^^)... "go" is another polite
expression of  "o". Isn't it fun?   Yoshiko
--
--------------------------
Yoshiko Fujita McFarland  (kamos@sfo.com)
The Earth Language Homepage:
http://www.sfo.com/~ucathinker/earth/english/ehome.htm