(2016-02-09, 12:33 pm)Digix Wrote: there is no reason why uneven relationships cannot exist. 
but according to other replies it is not necessary that you understand intentions of those people you mention well.

you are one who speaks to them in polite form as your own choice and they may be just wondering why you do that and some probably can be even offended.
I am pretty sure if you used plain for too, they woud react just fine

Quote:This looks similar to "yo" and "ne" usage where yo is dominat and nee is submissive statement it does not depend on your overall status but depends on what role you are playing in current situation.

Quote:I am not sure how valid it is in japan  but anything what implies that you are old is highly offensive in western world, they go as far as banning entire words that were used for ages.
according to anime japan is pretty much same.

dialog Wrote:先輩： 咲！
さき： あ、先輩！
先輩： 見学の人？
エリン： はい。
先輩： 中で見たら？
エリン： 見てもいい？
さき： エリン！？だめよ。
さき： 先輩には、「見てもいいですか」。
エリン： 見てもいいですか？
先輩： どうぞ。

(2016-02-09, 12:33 pm)Digix Wrote: If so, then usage of polite language is, like I said ,dependent on your own choice and attitude not on some language requirements.

Quote:I don't understand how you can have gone from asking about the basic meaning and usage of politeness levels when you started this thread to speaking with authority on it to contradict people with more experience in both the language and the culture than you have.

Quote:This doesn't even make sense. That's not how よ and ね work at all. よ , roughly speaking, marks that you stating something you think the other person may not know; and importantly, it also softens the statement. The same statement without よ sounds more blunt than the statement with よ even if nothing else changes. ね simply invites your conversation partner to comment on your statement, with a fairly strong sense that that comment will be in agreement with what you've said. They serve totally different functions. They can even be used at the end of the same sentence (always in the order よね).

Quote:This is absolutely not correct. Japan has a culture that sees age as a kind of status, and it's important to respect that status.

(2016-02-09, 5:24 pm)vix86 Wrote:

(2016-02-09, 12:33 pm)Digix Wrote: If so, then usage of polite language is, like I said ,dependent on your own choice and attitude not on some language requirements.

The usage or non-usage of polite language isn't set in stone like syntax. If you are talking to an elder and use plain form, the things you said don't suddenly become "wrong" in the same way as saying: "rans stores I to" in English. The usage or non-usage of certain degrees of politeness is more along the lines of "social incorrectness." This still doesn't mean you can/should ignore politeness in a language because its a 'social construct' and not a language construct, because doing so is likely to impact your life directly.

Language is about communicating and interacting with people so being able to use and understand politeness usage are still just as core to the language as knowing how to put together a syntactically correct sentence. Some might argue that "I never plan to talk to people in Japanese so I don't need to know politeness stuff." but by ignoring politeness rules, or remaining ignorant to it, you may very well be missing some meta-information that say, an author of a book wanted send across by using politeness language in a conversation.

(2016-02-09, 5:51 pm)SomeCallMeChris Wrote: I'm sorry, I realize now that you are an expert in Japanese. I will stop trying to push my own poor misconceptions of the language on you and go back to reading my Japanese novel.

(2016-02-09, 5:28 pm)Digix Wrote: "Inviting to comment" is being submissive because you are leaving topic open  nee is basically question form sentence as if you are asking approval this is absolutely evident from intonation. where e is usually extended into nee or neee
yo is signaling that you do not accept comments to your claim.

...

like if teacher is speaking to you in plain and you reply in more polite way what is the reason behind that:
1 you are afraid of teacher blowing up in anger because you dared to question her superiority
2 you are afraid that teacher will be upset for ruining her status.
2 you are admitting her superiority.
3 you simply obey rules without any thinking.
4 you want to raise authority of your teacher in front of other people.
5 you want to please her by lying.

Quote:There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. 

(2016-02-09, 5:28 pm)Digix Wrote: "Inviting to comment" is being submissive because you are leaving topic open  nee is basically question form sentence as if you are asking approval this is absolutely evident from intonation. where e is usually extended into nee or neee
yo is signaling that you do not accept comments to your claim. like if child is saying to his father "breakfast is ready yo" that means he is not accepting excuses like "wait a minute" or something like that. You idea about information which person may not know follows same rule, because by using you you are stating that I know this for sure and you don't. also I think if you are not sure about that new information either you will not use yo. or maybe you will use yonee signaling that you are alowing to question your authority

I take this information from "Japanese the manga way" book which presents example that confirm my claims.

Japanese the Manga way Wrote:pg. 11 Requesting confirmation with ne

Ne can also represent an explicit request for confirmation, and in many such cases it carries the force of a genuine question, not merely a rhetorical one. But even then it expects the listener to agree or answer in the affirmative.

「一ノ関鮎美さんですね。」

(2016-02-11, 12:11 am)RawrPk Wrote: The man asking Ms. Ichinoseki is not at all "inviting the listener" to comment or "asking for approval". The speaker expects the listener to speak and agree or answer in the affirmative. This is an example that contracts ね being submissive.

Quote:The ne of confirmation or agreement is used after another sentence final particle, the question marker ka. Ka ne means 'I am not sure if ~, am I right?'. The ne of ka ne is pronounced with falling intonation.
山下くんは京大に入れますかね。 - I'm not sure whether Mr.Yamashita can get into Kyoto University. What do you say?

Roger Pulvers Wrote:...If you were asked to describe the Japanese language, what would you say?

You might point out features of the way it is used, specifying perhaps how it can be subtlely sensitive to the occasion. When formal or polite expressions are called for, as when speaking to a superior or someone older, you may cite how honorifics, known as keigo, are used. When a confrontation between speakers seems to be evident, you would perhaps point out how ambiguous forms of speech may come into play to avoid unpleasantness. And you may even add that Japanese is full of pauses and silences, since it is a language that avoids self-assertion. It also often omits the subject in a sentence, as the language favors indirect speech.

But are these features belonging to the Japanese language, or are they traits of a Japanese personality? Does a language have intrinsic features such as subtlety, sensitivity, ambiguity and self-assertion — or are these features of usage by a certain people at a certain time in their history?
[...]
Why should people have to “act like Japanese” just because they use the language?

It is high time the Japanese realized that the qualities they ascribe to their language are features of usage that can be and are being modified by myriad circumstances in the passage of time. The more foreigners who speak Japanese, the greater benefit it will be for the Japanese to understand what is linguistically intrinsic in their language and what is simply custom.

The use of the Japanese language by Japanese is both elegantly concise and impressively flexible. A language itself, of course, cannot be either “verbose” or “inarticulate,” since these are social, not linguistic, phenomena. Hence I have met hundreds of verbose Japanese people, because the language is just as good a medium for allowing people to talk the hind legs off a donkey as any other.

A language is a medium. It is a vehicle that we drive, sometimes slow, sometimes fast; sometimes clumsily, sometimes adeptly. It all depends on the driver. The number of words in a language in no way limits a people’s expressiveness. It is how they are subtlely variegated and combined that produces the expressiveness.

The Japanese language today has become a vehicle driven by different nationalities, thanks to the many non-Japanese living, working and active in public life here. This is giving Japanese people a more objective view of their own language not as an exclusive ethnic code but as a normal vehicle of communication. The days when a Japanese listens to a foreigner speaking Japanese with skeptical disbelief are over.

(2016-02-11, 4:23 pm)vonPeterhof Wrote: I guess it is technically possible to learn to understand Japanese of varying politeness levels without really understanding (or even acknowledging) the logic and meaning behind them, but to me that just feels like deliberately limiting yourself to incomplete understanding.

Quote:But are these features belonging to the Japanese language, or are they traits of a Japanese personality?

(2016-02-11, 4:23 pm)vonPeterhof Wrote: Just to give a very clear counterexample to the idea that keigo is about familiarity and not politeness - open any article on the Japanese Wikipedia, or on any news website other than NHK. They are, by and large, written in "plain" language, and the only places where you'll find です's and ます's are the external bits aimed directly at the reader: notifications, disclaimers, apologies, etc. Now why would encyclopaedias and news outlets feel the need to present information to you in a way that suggests they're your close friend? Resources for learning Japanese tend not to emphasize this fact as strongly as those about Korean, but politeness and formality are two separate parameters. Official business correspondence is high in both of them, a friendly chat between two childhood friends of the same age is usually low in both, while everything else can vary. An academic article isn't addressed to anyone in particular, so it doesn't need to be polite to anyone, but the style needs to be formal if you want it to be taken seriously. On the other hand, a male school or college student hanging out after classes with fellow students from year groups above his (or those in the same group, but not particularly familiar to him yet) may want to stick to です and ます and use 僕 as a first person pronoun (less formal than 私, more polite than 俺).

(2016-02-11, 8:17 pm)Arino Wrote: City dweller on ranch holiday: an American who lives in a city and takes holidays on a guest ranch in the West.


That's really offensive. I won't dare to say the D word ever again. Please teach me everything you know about japanese politeness levels.

(2016-02-11, 8:09 pm)vix86 Wrote: English has probably one of the largest vocabularies of any language out there due to the assimilation of other languages.

Tzadeck Wrote:Hmm, I don't really care about this rambling discussion all that much, but when I was in university I was taught that desu/masu was about distance ('distal politeness'), and that it is a whole different concept from keigo ('honorific' vs 'humble'). Distal politeness is for the most part about familiarity, whereas honorific language is about vertical position and distinguishing between in-group out-group. This way of thinking doesn't work perfectly, but it always suited me well enough.

(2016-02-11, 11:51 pm)Dudeist Wrote: Nothing wrong with the word dude IMHO. As a priest in the Church of the Latter Day Dude [the dudeists] I think I can speak with some authority on that. However that is just my opinion man.

http://dudeism.com/