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Japanese exhibits pronoun avoidance, meaning that using pronouns is often too direct in Japanese, and considered offensive or strange. [6] One would not use pronouns for oneself, 私 (watashi, 'I'), or for another, あなた (anata, 'you'), but instead would omit pronouns for oneself, and call the other person by name:
Japanese pronouns (代名詞, daimeishi) are words in the Japanese language used to address or refer to present people or things, where present means people or things that can be pointed at. The position of things (far away, nearby) and their role in the current interaction (goods, addresser, addressee , bystander) are features of the meaning ...
Many languages feature the T–V distinction, where two or more different pronouns are used contextually to convey formality or familiarity.In contrast, languages with pronoun avoidance tend to feature complex systems of honorifics and use pronoun avoidance as a form of negative politeness, [2] instead employing expressions referring to status, relationship or title. [1]
Japanese uses honorific constructions to show or emphasize social rank, social intimacy or similarity in rank. The choice of pronoun used, for example, will express the social relationship between the person speaking and the person being referred to, and Japanese often avoids pronouns entirely in favor of more explicit titles or kinship terms. [2]
The reason for this is that in Japanese, sentences (other than occasional inverted sentences or sentences containing afterthoughts) always end in a verb (or other predicative words like adjectival verbs, adjectival nouns, auxiliary verbs)—the only exceptions being a few sentence-ending particles such as ka, ne, and yo.
The Japanese language makes use of a system of honorific speech, called keishō (敬称), which includes honorific suffixes and prefixes when talking to, or referring to others in a conversation. Suffixes are often gender-specific at the end of names, while prefixes are attached to the beginning of many nouns.
If separating words using spaces is also permitted, the total number of known possible meanings rises to 58. [38] Czech has the syllabic consonants [r] and [l], which can stand in for vowels. A well-known example of a sentence that does not contain a vowel is Strč prst skrz krk, meaning "stick your finger through the neck."
Some words associated with men's speech include: the informal da in place of the copula desu, first person pronouns such as ore and boku, and sentence-final particles such as yo, ze, zo, and kana. [5] Masculine speech also features less frequent use of honorific prefixes and fewer aizuchi response tokens. [12]