Talk:Japanese pronouns
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What about "Washi"? Shouldn't it be listed, too? 82.135.90.245 10:21, 1 July 2007 (UTC)
Could somebody add more lengthy discussion of under what circumstances each pronoun would be used? --Kenji Yamada 05:31, 11 January 2006 (UTC)
Isn't there a rather rude pronoun for "you", "temee" or something. 惑乱 分からん 12:25, 10 November 2006 (UTC)
I believe 爾 is also a character for "nanji"/なんじ, as indicated hereabouts: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-bin/wwwjdic.cgi?1D. --138.16.27.161 20:49, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
[edit] What does this even mean?
From the article:
- The Japanese language does not have pronouns as a grammatical category of words. Rather, the various words for "I", "you", "we", "they", and so on function as nouns for the purposes of sentence structure, grammar, and syntax.
If a word functions as a substitute for a noun, isn't it by definition a pronoun? What makes Japanese unique such that you don't consider these words to be pronouns? —Umofomia 09:55, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
I believe the least subtle difference is it's ordinary usage and grammatical to modify them like normal nouns - "the tall he", "the short me" - where that's awkward at best in many languages like English. --138.16.27.161 19:05, 13 May 2007 (UTC)
- Both of the two most authoritative Japanese monolingual dictionaries 広辞苑 and 大辞林 label わたし, あなた, etc. as pronouns. Maybe it's safe enough to say that Japanese does have pronouns, while it is certain that they don't have declensions that English pronouns have, and that there is no particular grammatical difference between Japanese pronouns and nouns other than the function as a substitution. --Tohru 07:03, 2 August 2007 (UTC)
The statement "Japanese does not have pronouns" is often taught to learners of the Japanese language, but (as Umofomia wrote above) the fact that they function as a substitute for a noun does make them pronouns. It seems that there are (at least) two reasons why we are taught this. The main reason is to discourage us from using them too often: pronouns are not used as frequently in Japanese compared to many other languages, and sometimes their use is rude. The second reason is that most Japanese pronouns are not pure: they have other meanings. In English the common pronouns have no other meaning: for example, "I", "you", and "they" have no other use except as pronouns. But in Japanese the words used as pronouns have other meaning: 私 means "private" or "personal"; 僕 means "manservant". Marty Pauley (talk) 15:40, 13 January 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Temae
Temae has a meaning of I, too. The word is also used with domo(共,ども). Temae-domo, meaning we, mostly used by store or ryokan workers to customers in a humble way. And domo is not a pronoun, but a suffix. Oda Mari 08:39, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
- I think this comment touches on a number of important weaknesses in this article. I don't think it's sufficiently clear that -domo, -ra, -tachi are suffixed to (conventionally) singular words. Also you have 3rd person -ra as "very informal". This is this is true of aitsu-ra, but not for kare-ra and (much rarer) kanojo-ra; both often found in newspapers and other formal writing.
- There is also the issue of secondary uses of some pronouns for a different person, e.g. boku (conventionally 1st person) used to refer to addressee, or kare (conventionally 3rd person) used to refer to addressee, in addition to the example of temae-domo mentioned above. Perhaps this merits a (sourced) section discussing it - simply adding these uses to the tables would not distinguish between primary and secondary uses of these words.
- This article could be improved by (1) clearly indicating the difference between archaic and current pronoun-like forms as well as changes in level of formality (maybe there's a separate article or two waiting to be written about this?), and (2) a discussion of the dominant thoughts on how these words should be classified and how they are used in Japanese and a focus on this, rather than trying to list up all Japanese pronouns. Since the category has unclear boundaries, I'm not sure this would be possible anyway. I'm sorry I'm not able to cite more specifics, but there is a considerable body of research in Japanese and some in English dealing with this class of words (a useful English reference is Takao Suzuki (sociolinguist)'s Words in context). 125.175.181.79 13:54, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Chin
Isn't 朕 (chin?) used by the Emperor of Japan as a first-person pronoun? JadziaLover (talk) 20:17, 12 December 2007 (UTC)
