Re: Distal / polite

Ben Bullock wrote:
>
> "Bart Mathias" <mathias@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
> news:GfLVe.10702$b37.4859@xxxxxxxxxxx
>
>> Ben Bullock wrote:
>>
>>> This is related to a new (recently merged) page on Wikipedia:
>>>
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_honorifics
>
>
>> "Distal" is a fairly well-used term. I may have learned it from a
>> Jorden textbook; I'm no longer sure. To my surprise, the word is
>> referenced only once, in "distal deictic (-a)," in the index in Martin
>> (RGoJ). But it has come in my mind to be essentially a name for the
>> desumasutai, as opposed to the "intimate" datai.
>
>
> The problem is for me I'm not sure what the difference between "distal"
> and "polite" is. I don't want to be accused of trashing things which I
> don't understand; is there something I should be aware of?

On reflexion, I don't see any reason to adopt the term "distal." I
think pretty much whatever English terms one decides to use in a
discussion of 敬語, they are potentially misleading without the discussion.

I liked "distal," as I said, because it reflects the notion of being
distant from one's addressee, but one could say that Japanese "polite"
language does that.

This wouldn't be exactly the sense of English "polite" = "not rude,"
because I think it could be argued that rude language will also put
one's addressee at a distance, but as someone has already pointed out,
it's not a matter of "polite" vs. "rude." It's more a matter of
restrained vs. not restrained.

If too much is made of the putting-in-the-out-group function of ですま
す, then it might become especially necessary to explain things like お
かあさん、おはようございます, families where the wife and children speak
the "master of the house" with 丁寧語, or somebody saying ありがとうご
ざいました to someone she knows well; none of this is meant to be
unfriendly. (Not that ingroup-outgroup borders don't readily shift
according to immediate circumstances.)

And "distal" for one side of the matter might suggest that the other
kind of speech implies closeness or familiarity, which is too narrow.
Consider the drill sergeant talking to the recruit he has never set eyes
on before, or the exchanges between a cop and the ちんぴら he has just
arrested. You could explain a "familiar tone" that would cover these
circumstances; it would be on the same order as explaining that not
using "polite" language isn't necessarily impolite.

まとめにくい話だが, but what I'm saying is mainly don't worry about
"distal."

>> [...]
>> I was much more bothered by "Verbs may be substituted by more polite
>> ones." I can't get used to the idea that one verb can substitute
>> another verb, and even if it could, what would it substitute that other
>> verb *for*?
>
> Do you have a suggestion for a rephrasing? At the moment, almost
> everything in the article from the top to before "Grammatical Overview"
> was written or rewritten by me, so it's probably my fault if the page
> doesn't make sense, and I'd like to fix it up. [...]

The problem here was simply that for someone who speaks my brand of
English, "substitute," the verb, pretty much has to mark its third
argument with "for." If I take your place, I'm not substituting you,
I'm substituting for you. I can't substitute a verb by a more polite
one, I have to substitute a more polite verb for an (original) verb.

Maybe my English is that of a minority of old American geezers, in which
case your response should be to do nothing but silently pity me. In my
English, the example sentence would have something like the following
substituting for it: "Verbs may be replaced by more polite ones," "One
has the option of using more polite verbs," etc.

Bart
.

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