Talk:Japanese/Grammar/Honorifics

Untitled
I don't think Japanese use "こはい" or "後輩". 先輩 can be an affix, but not 後輩.

Regarding the polite forms of 食べる, I think 食べませ is not used. Native speakers would say 食べてください, or 食べなさい, for example. So I think it should be noted with the asterisk mark. Tomos 11:41, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Issues with opening paragraph
That opening paragraph seems a bit off. In terms of opportunity and regard within the workplace, the West and Japan are the same in that you wouldn't expect just anyone to have a go at making company-level decisions, or managing an arbitrary other person, whenever they felt like it. That's why we have job titles (such as CEO, and manager). If the author is trying to say that social-level opportunities are limited by a person's role in life, then I'd be keen to hear some support of that via examples. As it is, a person's role in life seems only to affect the use of language, so the paragraph should make that clear (and refrain from making the implications it makes). Since in the West we have honorific titles, too, it seems like the only important difference between the West and Japan, for the purposes of this article, are that the honorific system is more deeply designed into the language. Respect and courtesy exist, of course, for practical reasons, and that's not mentioned here, either.


 * Agreed.

In American and other Western societies, hierarchy is based on supposed skill level and theoretically, everyone has equal opportunity.


 * I don't know where the author got this, but America and the other Western societies are far from having equal opportunities for everybody, I'm not even sure what is meant by "opportunities".


 * Different levels of politeness are nothing special and are also a common occurrence in english. For example, you would adress your professor or teacher differently than, let's say, your spouse. However your spouse could be a leading figure in research with a skill level over 9000 and thus far surpassing your professor's skill or your own.


 * Like mentioned in the comment above one might be more polite to their boss so they don't get fired, but the boss might be far less qualified than oneself.
 * Also most will be more polite to people who are significantly older.


 * The Japanese society has a strong Confucianist influence and there are certain social norms in place that differ quite a bit from those in Western societies. In particular, closeness and respect might be expressed differently. For example, honorifics might be used in a fairly casual conversation where they certainly wouldn't in english. Another example would be using the family name where many americans would use the given name.


 * I think the quoted sentence tries to make a related statement, but I can hardly guess what that would be. Also, offering various ways of being polite is nothing special, but offering grammatical tools is. I think removing the sentence works quite well in this context. 2A02:8109:9440:5490:2936:3504:B4DA:692F (discuss) 05:22, 11 August 2017 (UTC)