Distal / polite

No one on Wikipedia seems to know this, so I'll try asking here.

This is related to a new (recently merged) page on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_honorifics

I am trying to fix up a rather messy merge of two pages. One of the pages (the old Japanese honorifics) I had already done a lot of work on when I found another, similar page written in the same style as the Japanese grammar page,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_grammar.

Although it is a "featured page" on Wikipedia, meaning it is supposed to be exceptionally well written or something, I'm not much of a fan of the Japanese grammar page. In my view it is rather robotic and doesn't seem to be written with a lot of insight or intuition into the language. It is more like a maths text or something. Anyway, the page "Politeness and respect (Japanese language)" was merged into that one by someone else, but I'm concerned about a few points. The main thing which bothers me is the "distal" thing on that page. I don't want to just delete something without any discussion, but I'm not sure "distal" is a very meaningful category. It seems to be just an artifact introduced to separate "de gozaimasu" from "desu" to me. Before I start trying to edit that page, I'd like to ask opinions from others. Attempts to edit the page would also be very welcome of course, since it is Wikipedia.

yorosiku onegai simasu (or "yorosiku bouya" as we say in my house.)


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