Another blog post on Japanese! This time I'm talking about politeness levels (and the pronouns associated with them) and time.
Politeness
Many languages (including many/most Indo-European languages) have some way of indicating how politely you are speaking to someone. English is actually kind of unique in the European languages in that it has none. Most European languages have the "T-V" distinction, so named for the French pronouns tu and vous, which both mean "you" but in informal and polite speech, respectively. Spanish does it (tu/usted) and so does German (du/Sie). English apparently had a similar distinction at one time, but it has been lost in virtually all modern dialects.
Japanese has a system of politeness that can be compared, at least to an extent, to these kinds of systems. It is, however, much more extensive, affecting conjugation of all types of predicates, and there are many verb forms which range on a more continuous spectrum of politeness, rather than a simple dichotomy between "polite" and "informal".
The first level of distinction between polite and informal speech is the distinction between distal and direct conjugations. In general, direct style is used between people who are intimately familiar and when a superior speaks to an inferior, while distal style is used pretty much everywhere else. When you look up a verb or adjective in a Japanese dictionary, it will be listed in the direct style.
For example, let's consider the verb neru, "to sleep". All verbs in direct style end in -u. Unline the corresponding English "to sleep", this is not an "infinitive" form, as Japanese has no such form. neru is, in fact, a complete sentence. It means "someone sleeps" or "someone will sleep." The subject, as mentioned in the last post, is completely dependent on context, so you could really replace "someone" with anything. (The distinction between "sleeps" and "will sleep" is covered in the second half of this blog post.)
Now, if I use neru, I am implying that whomever I am talking to is either very familiar to me (a close friend, a family member) or inferior to me (I'm their boss or their parent). However, if I want to talk to someone else (a colleague, acquaintance, superior, complete stranger), I would have to use the distal style. Placing verbs in the distal style amounts to attaching the pseudo-verb -masu to the end of something called the "stem". The stem of neru is ne-, and attaching -masu gives nemasu. (A note on pronunciation: while neru is actually said how it's written, the -masu ending is said so often that it is usually just said something like -mas. This, of course, depends on the dialect of the speaker, and sometimes saying the -u will have a different meaning.)
In terms of use, the direct and distal styles of verbs are identical when they are used as sentential or clausal predicates. However distal-style verbs are almost never used as modifiers. So neru kodomo means "the sleeping child", but nemasu kodomo sounds very strange indeed.
Adjectival and nominal predicates also have a direct-distal distinction. The dictionary form of an adjective is its direct form - like akai for "red". When you put it into distal style, you add the distal form of the copula, desu, to get akai desu. Just like verbs, distal-style adjectives are (practically) never used to modify things, only as sentential or clausal predicates. Similarly, nominal predicates use the copula: hon da in direct style, and hon desu in distal. da is kind of funny because it likes to change forms when the nominal predicate is used to modify things - becoming no or na or disappearing altogether. (Another pronunciation note: desu, like -masu, is so common that it's usually pronounced more like des, and again, pronouncing it with the -u is dialectical, and sometimes has a different meaning.)
Okay, so now you know a bit about direct versus distal style. When you use it seems to correspond pretty nicely to the T-V distinction in European languages, actually. But this is only the beginning in Japanese. (German has tons of pointless inflectional endings; Spanish has tons of verb tenses and moods; Japanese had to have something to make it hard for foreigners to learn!)
Japanese has some other verb forms: humble-polite and honorific-polite. Most/all verbs can be put into these forms, though there are some irregularities. The irregularities, of course, come up with the most common verbs, as in any language.
An important concept when talking about humble and honorific forms is the group dynamic. For example, the humble-polite form is used when you want to talk about people in your "in-group". Who is in that group depends on who you are talking to and what you are talking about. You are always in your own in-group, and the smallest possible in-group is just you and nobody else. If you're in a business meeting, talking to your boss about the status of a project, your in-group might be you and your department, while your "out-group" will be your boss and possibly other management heads. But if you're talking to your boss about your plans for the holidays, your in-group might be you and your family, while your out-group might be your boss and his/her family. If you're talking to a friend, they can come and go in your in-group depending on the subject. Japanese people are constantly aware of this changing group dynamic, and it's something that foreigners just have to learn.
As was already mentioned, the humble form is used to talk about people in your in-group. Conversely, the honorific form is used to talk about people in your out-group. These forms are more polite than straight distal style, and when you use them is a matter of social requirements which, again, foreigners must just learn from experience. These forms are often used by people who are in public relations of many kinds - secretaries answering phones, customer support, and the like. In fact companies will actually have new employees attend a sort of "etiquette course' to learn how to speak using these forms, as they are not commonly used by most Japanese. They are also used in many kinds of ritualized greetings, expressions, and introductions, which are extremely important in Japanese culture. As these forms aren't commonly used in most speech, I won't bore you with the nitty-gritty grammatical details, but it suffices to say that most verbs will conjugate regularly in these forms, with a few common ones (like "to have", "to do", "to be", "to know", "to go", "to come") being replaced by different verbs which have the appropriate polite connotations.
Politeness also manifests itself in other ways. As was hinted to in the last post, Japanese has a complex pronoun system. If a pronoun is necessary - and it often isn't - which pronoun is used is dependent upon the relative social ranks and intimacy levels of the two parties involved (the speaker and the referent). For eample, anata means "you (singular)", but it's only used to talk to people of equal or lesser rank than you, and is not used by intimate friends. Use of family names, sometimes with polite or endearing suffixes, is actually far more common than pronouns in normal Japanese speech, to the surprise of many foreigners. -san is a gender-neutral generic name suffix that translates as "Mr." or "Mrs./Ms.", but there are others. -sama is (much) more polite; -kun is often used to speak of male friends; -tyan (-chan) has a childish or diminutive feel and can be used to speak of children or "cutesy" young girls. I doubt this is by any means an exhaustive list.
Whereas English has only a few verbs usually used for giving and receiving ("to give" and "to receive" or "to get", for the most part), Japanese has many more. There are five basic verbs that mean "to give" and two that mean "to get". Which verb to use is again based on the relative ranks of the two parties (giver and receiver), as well as which group (in or out) the giver and receiver are in. This comes up much more often than you might think, because in Japanese, you can give not only objects, but also actions. In English, we say "someone washed the car for me", while it would be expressed as something like "someone gave me the washing of the car". To complicate matters, you can of course bring in other parties, by adding levels of indirection (having someone make someone else wash the car, for you), which gets really fun when multiple parties are in different groups at different ranks. This is something we learned in second year Japanese and I still don't get it right.
My last example of politeness in Japanese, which follows from the previous section, is the frankly absurd number of possible ways you can use to tell or ask someone to do something. They're all based on verbs of receiving, so you've got that complication to deal with. But ignoring that, you've still got an incredible number of options for making commands, ranging on a politeness scale from downright rude to more polite than would be necessary for addressing the Emperor (if you were actually able to make a command to the Emperor). Consider the following far-from-exhaustive list of command forms of the verb taberu, "to eat":
- tabero - direct, rude, masculine, impatient, extremely intimate
- tabe-nasai - what a parent would tell their children
- tabete - nicer
- tabete kure - nicer still
- tabete kurenai - "won't you eat?" intimate, friendly
- tabete kurenai ka - same as above, but with a question particle - a little stiffer, more masculine
- tabete kudasai - standard form, often used in public address and instruction manuals - generic "please eat"
- tabete kudasaimasen - "won't you eat?" more polite
- tabete kudasaimasen ka - same as above, stiffer from the ka particle
- tabete kudasaranai desyoo ka - omfg polite
- otabe ni narimasite kudasaranai desyoo ka - OK, now I'm just making things up
So as I'm sure this has convinced you, politeness is far more complex in the Japanese language than in the European languages. This is undoubtedly due to the complex social hierarchy that has developed in Japanese culture which never really did in Europe.
Time
Now for the second major topic of this post: time. When I say time, I mean things like tense and aspect.
The first thing I should talk about is the distinction between progressive actions and instantive actions. I have no idea if these are the proper terms. I doubt they are. When I say a "progressive" action, I mean an action which has a beginning, a middle, and an end in time; and where the beginning and end are not the same point. In English and Spanish, progressive actions are indicated using the progressive aspect - the "to be x-ing" or "estar x-ndo" forms. So if I walk somewhere, that has a beginning, middle, and end. I begin walking, then I am walking, then I finish walking. By contrast, an instantive action is one which happens in an instant, one which has no beginning and end, just a single point in time before which it hasn't yet happened, and after which it already has happened. In English, instantive actions are markedly less common than progressive actions. Something like a cup falling to the floor and shattering is one that I can think of.
In Japanese, most verbs are instantive. Many verbs indicate not necessarily an "action" as we would define it but instead a sort of "change of state". For example, the use of the verb kuru, "to come", is a bit bewildering. In English, if a friend is coming over to my house, that action has a start point (when they leave their house), an interval when it's happening (as they're walking down the street), and an endpoint (when they come in my door). But in Japanese, my friend never starts or stops. kuru is an instantive action. Only when they actually arrive at my door have they come.
This preponderance of instantive verbs - verbs which either have not yet happened or which did - corresponds very neatly to the tense system in Japanese. There are really only two tenses: "perfect" and "imperfect". The perfect tense is used to talk about things that happened. The imperfect tense is used to talk about things that do happen on a regular basis (similar to the English simple present), or about things which have not yet happened. That is, there is no distinction between present and future tense in most Japanese, although you can certainly use adverbs to locate an action in time ("tomorrow" or "in five minutes").
There are ways to express progressive actions in Japanese, but it's not quite as common as in English. How you express it depends on the verb and the situation. Some verbs, like our friend taberu, let you express the progressive aspect in a very similar way as in English: gerund + form of to be. That is, tabete iru means "I am eating." Actually, it's not quite that cut-and-dry. tabete iru can mean "I am eating", but it could just as well mean "I have finished eating and am now in the state of having eaten". In fact, for most verbs, the latter interpretation is more likely: kite iru does not mean "he is coming (over)", but rather "he has arrived and is now here". For verbs like kuru, there's another way of expressing progressive action:
Okay
I think that's all I can write ;)
