Re: The deliberate redundancy; was: Idioms
| From: | Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, June 10, 1999, 10:36 |
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At 11:45 09/06/99 -0700, you wrote:
>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.
>
It is indeed! I began to learn Japanese only two years ago!
>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
That was something our Japanese teacher told to us when one of my fellow
learners of Japanese answered to one of her question repeating exactly the
words she used, 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)?
Christophe Grandsire
|Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.
"Reality is just another point of view."
homepage : http://www.bde.espci.fr/homepage/Christophe.Grandsire/index.html