Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2016 April 9

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April 9

Manual keigo

The article Manual keigo describes how some Japanese employers instruct their teenage employees in honorific speech with manuals that prescribe non-standard polite forms of words and phrases. However, it's unclear to me why the employers don't teach their employees the correct phrasings instead. Are the correct phrasings much more difficult to teach? --Metropolitan90 (talk) 17:49, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

Keigo is very context sensitive, and to speak it properly takes a lot of nuance. Manual keigo takes some common features of keigo and flattens it into something that can be easily learned and remembered - what's most important is that it doesn't sound like everyday speech among peers. There are very similar things in English - one thing I remember from arranging my wedding is that the photographer, florist and so on all wrote and spoke in a way that had a kind of polite, refined sound to it but was not actually strictly grammatically correct: they'd say "myself" and "yourself" where they actually only needed "me" and "you", "whom" where "who" would be appropriate, etc - "Please send the payment to myself", "Whom will be attending?" and so on. A pedant might frown, but it has the desired effect of reminding you that it's a special event with a certain amount of class. Smurrayinchester 09:01, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Hiragana#Table_of_hiragana's completeness

Does the Hiragana table cover all phonemes/sounds/syllables in Japanese? --Llaanngg (talk) 19:22, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

Yes. KägeTorä - (^影_虎) (もしもし！) 19:50, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

So, if we wanted, could we write exclusively in hiragana, and not learn to write the kana? Or that's not a personal choice? --Llaanngg (talk) 22:25, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

(Do you mean kanji?) As the article says, "For example, The Tale of Genji and other early novels by female authors used hiragana extensively or exclusively." —Tamfang (talk) 23:47, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

And now I'm wondering whether modern editions of Genji use kanji. —Tamfang (talk) 23:43, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

As far as I know, even the earliest surviving editions use kanji. It's just speculation that the (now lost) original manuscript used only hiragana, and that's not because Murasaki Shikibu didn't know kanji (she did, and was apparently something of a prodigy), but only because that was the convention for women at the time. (Sources: her Wikipedia article and this thread and the "original" text with kanji.)

Also, since Genji was mentioned to illustrate that Japanese can be written entirely in kana, it's worth pointing out that it was written circa 1020 in the Japanese equivalent of Chaucer's English. Kana writing of modern Japanese was not very phonetic before 20th-century Japanese script reform (because of pronunciation changes, like English, I think). And I'm not sure that kana are actually very good at representing some non-standard dialects of Japanese, though you can transcribe any language in them if you have to, even phonetically unrelated languages like Ainu or English. -- BenRG (talk) 19:56, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Yes, I meant kanji. And I wonder why wouldn't the Japanese language get rid of this redundancy then? People could start writing more on hiragana more and more until kanji is completely forgotten. it's just economy of means. --Llaanngg (talk) 00:58, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

I think the Japanese people are too culturally attached to kanji to give them up, because of their long history (over 1200 years), their aesthetic appeal (YMMV), and because they add to the expressiveness of written Japanese. Kanji are used to create compound words that would be incomprehensible if spelled phonetically (like an acronym/initialism if you don't know what the letters stand for). Wordplay involving different kanji with the same reading is common. For example, the title of the movie and short story Hotaru no Haka is a pun: the word hotaru (meaning firefly) is written with characters that mean "fire dripping down" (a reference to firebombing), instead of the usual character for firefly. It's probably impossible to write that title in hiragana without losing half of its meaning.

Written English also has unnecessary elements: two letter cases, italics, parentheses, etc. Without them you could still get your meaning across, but some nuance would be lost. -- BenRG (talk) 04:34, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

Also note how the Latin alphabet is nowhere near a complete covering of English phonemes, but every English-language spelling reform has so far failed to get traction. --217.140.96.140 (talk) 13:31, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

It is indeed possible to write entirely in kana. Books for Japanese children are written this way (and even include spaces!), and my first mobile phone in Japan which was capable of SMS only used katakana (this was in 1998). KägeTorä - (^影_虎) (もしもし！) 12:46, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

I can't lay my hand to most of my books right now, but IIRC, when discussing the progressive complexification of Japanese writing in The Japanese Language, Roy Andrew Miller remarks something to the effect that the complexity and difficulty of the system would have been seen as an advantage rather than a disadvantage at the time it developed. He also points to the stultifying boredom of courtiers obliged to be at the Shogun's court but with nothing real to do there, and suggests that the complexities helped pass the time better. Not sure about that bit, myself. --ColinFine (talk) 19:03, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

That passage, iirc, also mentions some riddle-like elaborations that have, I assume, happily died out. —Tamfang (talk) 23:43, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

Are the following sentences accepted in the spoken English language?

"I don't know where is he." (instead of "I don't know where he is" in Standard English).

"Do you know what is he doing right now?" (instead of "Do you know what he is doing right now?" in Standard English). 5.22.134.233 (talk) 20:07, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

No. Difficult to provide references for a negative, but either of these would mark the speaker as not a native speaker of modern English. They would however be understood.

However, as an answer to a question like "Do you know where he is?" (with the implication that the questioner already knows), the answer "I don't know, where is he?" would be fine. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195) 90.199.208.67 (talk) 20:24, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

Thank you. 5.22.134.233 (talk) 06:19, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

Subject/verb inversion is a mark of questions. That includes subordinate clauses. that's why you say "where is he?" but "I wonder where he is."--Llaanngg (talk) 22:35, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

I'm quite aware of the formal reasons for this grammatical rule. I just wanted to know, whether it must only be observed in Standard English, and can be ignored in the spoken language. Anyway, thank you. 5.22.134.233 (talk) 06:19, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

Sentence #1 is definitely an error. #2 is also an error but it wouldn't sound quite as wrong, since the speaker might have been about to ask "What is he doing right now?" and then decided to prefix it with "do you know", so it came out as a collision between two clauses (like an editing error when writing). I.e. a native speaker might say such a thing as a speech error but they wouldn't say it on purpose. The listener would probably notice the error but not call attention to it. 50.0.121.79 (talk) 06:50, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

Add a comma to #2 and you ge "Do you know, what is he doing right now?" In my native-speaker estimation that's a correct informal usage. Short sentences like "I think" and "I wonder" and "Do you know(?)" are often used informally as if they were adverbial phrases. Since the original question was about spoken usage and the comma cannot be heard, I say #2 is correct. --69.159.61.172 (talk) 19:30, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

Oh come on! The sentence doesn't contain a comma, so don't pretend there is one. It's not proper spoken English. "Do you know what is he doing right now?" would mark the speaker as almost certainly a foreigner with English as second language. Akld guy (talk) 03:20, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

How about: "What (do you think) is he doing right now?" ???

Isn't it more acceptable in the spoken language ??? 5.22.134.233 (talk) 07:00, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

"What is he doing right now?" is perfectly acceptable English sentence construction, whether written or spoken. "What do you think is he doing right now?" is not. You attempted to muddy the waters by placing part of the question in brackets, and I can't imagine why. Akld guy (talk) 08:06, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Oh, I've put it in brackets, just in order to skip the correct argument in your response to 69.159.61.172 about the comma. So, your are really right about the comma, however I still wonder if you could also be right about the brackets. If I say "What do you think is he doing right now?", then this sentence can be interpreted as follows: "What is he doing right now (according to what you think)?", i.e. "What is he doing right now (in your opinion)?", so the "is he" can be justified, and does make sense (at least in spoken English), doesn't it? That's why I thought, my using such a construction may not automatically mark me as a non-native. 5.22.134.233 (talk) 11:10, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

You can't hear brackets when speaking, so if someone said "What do you think is he doing right now?", I would know that person is not a native speaker and is making a grammatical mistake. --Lgriot (talk) 11:29, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Here is an example of the one person who did speak in a way where you could hear brackets, and other punctuation marks for that matter. As to the OP's sentences the only time I hear them spoken that way is when a certain Jedi master is talking. MarnetteD|Talk 13:38, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

I'm not talking about brackets. Again, I wonder, why the sentence "What do you think is he doing right now?", can't be interpreted as follows: "What is he doing right now according to what you think?". 5.22.134.233 (talk) 17:10, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

The latter is a very non-standard way of asking the question, but it's a valid English sentence. The normal way of asking the same question is "What do you think he is doing right now?. You can rationalise any way you like, but you would be instantly recognised as a non-native speaker if you ask "What do you think is he doing right now?. No native ever says that. You must simply accept this, and move on. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:27, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

@JackofOz, please take a look at the following declaration:

• Declaration: "Yesterday they thought, he would die tomorrow".

In my native language, there are two constructions of When-questions - about the declaration above, as following:

• Question_1: "When did they think, he would die tomorrow?"
• Answer: "Yesterday".
• Question_2: "When, they thought yesterday, would he die?"
• Answer: "tomorrow".

I wonder, whether English can make a distinction between those different kinds of When-questions, whereas it does make a distinction between their different answers !! If it can't, then, isn't that a slight defect in the English syntax? I'd thought I could have "rescued" English from that defect, by suggesting constructions like "what, you think, is he doing right now?". I'd guessed this construction is impossible, so I suggested an alternative construction: "what, do you think, is he doing right now?". I'd known this construction is not possible either (or rather: is grammatically impossible), so I suggested it for the spoken language only. However, if this construction is not possible in the spoken language either, then I still wonder how we can rescue the English syntax from the (inevitable?) ambiguity in the When-questions, and also in the Where-questions (about declarations like "At home, I dream he lives in the street"), and likewise.

5.22.134.233 (talk) 00:07, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

You can suggest all you like, but that isn't what this desk is for. Rescuing the English language from its woes and travails is a full-time job, but the wages are pretty low, and it turns out to be an almost entirely unsuccessful undertaking. May you have greater success as a non-native speaker, where so many native speakers have fallen weeping bitterly by the wayside. But not here. Cheers. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 00:28, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

I don't understand why you think my question isn't what this desk is for. I'm here, not to suggest suggestions, but rather to ask questions about English language, and my current question is about whether the English syntax can make a distinction between different kinds of When-questions, and between different kinds of Where-questions, and the like. Anyways, I've put my current question in a separate thread, and you are invited to respond there. 5.22.134.233 (talk) 08:28, 12 April 2016 (UTC)