Quote:
Originally Posted by omk3
Well, as I'm learning japanese right now, I'm not sure if the words for I and you are new (they don't seem to be), but they are amazingly varied (me as in small boy, me as a superior adult man, me as a sexy woman, me as an equal, etc etc, in very simplistic terms), and still are never used if it can be avoided. It is a source of surprise that you don't learn I and you on your very first lesson, as in most languages I know, but it makes sense, as you can actually speak japanese without ever using these words.
And of course it says something about how japanese think, and how their society is structured. Maybe this is changing in recent years, but it seems that the sense of a japanese person's place in society (or any other group, like an extended family, or a company) is more important than the sense of self as we know it. Oversimplifications and gereralisations are dangerous and often wrong of course,  and I would appreciate a japanese person's views on this, if there is one around. |
Although I'm not Japanese, I've lived there for 13 years and I teach the language.
First of all, the concept of self and other appears very early in any language, Japanese is no exception. The language however doesn't use personal pronouns as a grammatical tool as in Western languages.
Hence the the concept of I is relative to a situation.
The following words are all I:
拙者
我
己
私
僕
俺
but they are used very differently depending on who you are and you're social status in relative terms.
There are plenty more, some related to gender, some historical that would only be used in jest or as a threat and some that are so ambiguous as to mean either I or you depending on the construction of a sentence.