Watashi Ni Koi Shita Obōsan

Japanese 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 of those words. The use of pronouns, especially when referring to oneself and speaking in the first person, vary between gender, formality, dialect and region where Japanese is spoken.

According to some Western grammarians, pronouns are not a distinct part of speech in Japanese, but a subclass of nouns, since they behave grammatically just like nouns. Among Japanese grammarians, whether pronouns should be considered a distinct has varied. Some considered them distinct, while others thought they were only nouns. The of today has followed Iwabuchi Etsutarō's model, which does not recognize pronouns as a distinct part of speech, but merely a subclass of nouns (see ).

Use and etymology

In contrast to present people and things, absent people and things can be referred to by naming; for example, by instantiating a class, "the house" (in a context where there is only one house) and presenting things in relation to the present, named and sui generis people or things can be "I'm going home", "I'm going to Hayao's place", "I'm going to the mayor's place", "I'm going to my mother's place" or "I'm going to my mother's friend's place". Functionally, deictic classifiers not only indicate that the referenced person or thing has a spatial position or an interactional role but also classify it to some extent. In addition, Japanese pronouns are restricted by a situation type (register): who is talking to whom about what and through which medium (spoken or written, staged or in private). In that sense, when a male is talking to his male friends, the pronoun set that is available to him is different from those available when a man of the same age talks to his wife and, vice versa, when a woman talks to her husband. These variations in pronoun availability are determined by the register.

In linguistics, generativists and other structuralists suggest that the Japanese language does not have pronouns as such, since, unlike pronouns in most other languages that have them, these words are syntactically and morphologically identical to nouns. As functionalists point out, however, these words function as personal references, demonstratives, and reflexives, just as pronouns do in other languages.

Japanese has a large number of pronouns, differing in use by formality, gender, age, and relative social status of speaker and audience. Further, pronouns are an open class, with existing nouns being used as new pronouns with some frequency. This is ongoing; a recent example is , which is now used by some young men as a casual first-person pronoun.

Pronouns are used less frequently in the Japanese language than in many other languages, mainly because there is no grammatical requirement to include the subject in a sentence. That means that pronouns can seldom be translated from English to Japanese on a one-to-one basis.

The common English personal pronouns, such as "I", "you", and "they", have no other meanings or connotations. However, most Japanese personal pronouns do. Consider for example two words corresponding to the English pronoun "I": also means "private" or "personal". carries a masculine impression; it is typically used by males, especially those in their youth.

Japanese words that refer to other people are part of the encompassing system of honorific speech and should be understood within that context. Pronoun choice depends on the speaker's social status (as compared to the listener's) as well as the sentence's subjects and objects.

The first-person pronouns (e.g., ) and second-person pronouns (e.g., ) are used in formal contexts (however the latter can be considered rude). In many sentences, pronouns that mean "I" and "you" are omitted in Japanese when the meaning is still clear.

When it is required to state the topic of the sentence for clarity, the particle is used, but it is not required when the topic can be inferred from context. Also, there are frequently used verbs that imply the subject and/or indirect object of the sentence in certain contexts: means "give" in the sense that "somebody other than me gives something to me or to somebody very close to me". also means "give", but in the sense that "someone gives something to someone other than me". This often makes pronouns unnecessary, as they can be inferred from context.

In sentences comprising a single adjective (often those ending in ), it is often assumed that the speaker is the subject. For example, the adjective can represent a complete sentence that means "I am lonely". When speaking of another person's feelings or emotions, would be used instead. Similarly, , as opposed to when referring to others. Thus, the first-person pronoun is usually not used unless the speaker wants to put a special stress on the fact that they are referring to themselves or if it is necessary to make it clear.

In some contexts, it may be considered uncouth to refer to the listener (second person) by a pronoun. If it is required to state the second person, the listener's surname, suffixed with or some other title (like "customer", "teacher", or "boss"), is generally used.

Gender differences in spoken Japanese also create another challenge, as men and women refer to themselves with different pronouns. Social standing also determines how people refer to themselves, as well as how they refer to other people.

Most common Japanese first-person pronouns by speakers and situations according to Yuko Saegusa (2009):

List of Japanese personal pronouns

The list is incomplete, as there are numerous Japanese pronoun forms, which vary by region and dialect. This is a list of the most commonly used forms. "It" has no direct equivalent in Japanese (though in some contexts the demonstrative pronoun is translatable as "it"). Also, Japanese does not generally inflect by case, so, ''I'' is equivalent to ''me''.

Job-related personal pronouns

Archaic personal pronouns

Suffixes

Suffixes are added to pronouns to make them plural.

Demonstrative and interrogative pronouns

Demonstrative words, whether functioning as pronouns, adjectives or adverbs, fall into four groups. Words beginning with indicate something close to the speaker (so-called ''proximal'' demonstratives). Those beginning with indicate separation from the speaker or closeness to the listener (''medial''), while those beginning with indicate greater distance (''distal''). Interrogative words, used in questions, begin with

Demonstratives are normally written in hiragana.

When a Japanese speaker uses ''ko-'', ''so-'' and ''a-'' forms, they are not necessarily considering spatial distance, but also psychological, temporal and topical distance.

For more forms, see Japanese demonstratives on Wiktionary.

Other interrogative pronouns include and .

Reflexive

Japanese has only one word corresponding to reflexive pronouns such as ''myself'', ''yourself'', or ''themselves'' in English. The word means "one's self" and may be used for some animals, including humans. It is not used for cold-blooded animals or inanimate objects.

Old Japanese pronouns

Each Old Japanese pronoun has a "long" form that ends in ''-re'', and a "short" form without ''-re''. When combining with a genitive particle, the short forms of personal pronouns, as well as animate nouns, notably combined only with ''ga'', while demonstratives (''ko'', ''so'', ''(k)a'') and inanimate nouns combined with ''no'', only with ''ga'' in limited circumstances; in contrast, modern Japanese pronouns (many of which were originally nouns) and nouns only combine with ''no''. The short forms are used with ''ga'' and in compounds, while the long forms are used independently.

Of these, ''tare'' evolved into modern ''dare'', whose genitive form is simply ''dare-no''. ''Ta-ga'' is sometimes used for literary effect, for example in the Japanese title of . ''Ware'' is often used in fiction, and ''wa-ga'' in fixed expressions, such as .

Genitive forms, when combining with a noun that began in a vowel, may fuse with it. For example, ''wa-ga'' "my" + ''imo'' "sister" → ''wa-gimo'' "my sister"; ''wa-ga'' + ''ipe₁'' "house" → ''wa-gipe₁'' "my house" (''wa-gie'' in modern Japanese).''Daijirin''

These demonstratives largely survived intact into modern Japanese. ''Kare'' came to be used as a gender-neutral third-person personal pronoun, and eventually used to translate masculine third-person pronouns specifically in European languages ("he/him"), while ''ka-no'' was used to create ''kanojo'' and to translate feminine pronouns ("she/her").

The modern pronouns ''kanojo'' and ''kareshi''

The third-person feminine pronoun, , had not existed until sometime around the end of the Tokugawa shogunate and the beginning of the Meiji era.''Nihon Kokugo Daijiten'' Prior to this, the distal demonstrative pronoun was used as a gender-neutral personal pronoun.

彼女 started out as a mere shortened spelling of the phrase , which could be spelt in full as の, literally simply means "that female person", and is composed of the genitive form of ''kare'', ''ka-no'', and the noun ''wonna'' (now ''onna''). Although not being a pronoun in a lexicographic sense, this phrase can be used pronominally like modern expressions such as or for the singular "they/them", for "he/him", and of course, for "she/her". The pronunciation of this phrase was consistently listed as across various pronunciation dictionaries for elementary students during the Meiji era. The earliest exception was the 1876 dictionary by 田中𦤺知, which listed . It has been suggested that the editor may have simply used ''ka-no zyo'' (now ''kanojo'') for novelty back when was still commonly used as a free noun. This unique pronunciation was listed in a few later dictionaries. The same aforementioned dictionaries and more also listed , and .

The phrase ''ka-no wonna'' (and its alternative ''ka-no zyo'') rose to prominence due to Meiji writers' need to translate third-person feminine pronouns in European languages, such as ''she'' and ''her'' in English or ''elle'' and ''elles'' in French, which they eventually incorporated into their own writings. An 1871 French-Japanese dictionary translated ''elle'' as , and ''elles'' as ; an 1885 English-Japanese dictionary translated ''her'' as , ''herself'' as , and ''she'' as . In contrast, masculine pronouns such as ''he''/''him''/''his'', ''il''/''ils'', etc. were translated with and .

''Kanojo'', as a lexicalized pronoun, was first attested in literature in its written furigana-glossed form as in the 1885 novel by Tsubouchi Shōyō. Meanwhile, Sudō Nansui (Mitsuaki) used and in his 1887 novel ; and Futabatei Shimei used in his novel ''Ukigumo'' published in the same year. As a phrase, ''ka-no wonna''/''ka-no zyo'' referred to female non-relatives, but as a pronoun, ''kanojo'' came to be used for female family members in literature, for example by Natsume Sōseki in his 1912 novel , where a character refers to his mother as ; the regular phrase still occurs in reference to a different woman. At this point, the phrase ''ka-no wonna'' and the pronoun ''kanojo''/''kanodyo'' coexisted with different usages even in the same work. ''Kanojo'' eventually acquired its status as a lexicalized noun meaning "girlfriend" during the late Taishō era.

The third-person masculine pronoun was coined during the early Shōwa era as an alternative to the once-gender-neutral and as the opposite to the feminine . Its first written attestation as a pronoun is attributed to Tokugawa Musei's 1929 essay collection ;''Daijisen'' as a noun meaning "boyfriend", to Nagai Kafū's 1934 novel . Morphologically, is composed of the aforementioned demonstrative-turned-personal pronoun and , the latter of which is an honorific suffix to names, mostly male names, and can be translated as "Mr."'' Kenkyusha's New Japanese-English Dictionary'' ''Kareshi'' was often used in a tongue-in-cheek way; compare the masculine and self-aggrandizing , which also consists of a pronoun () and an honorific suffix ().

See also

*Gender differences in spoken Japanese
*Japanese honorifics

Notes

References

External links

Japan Reference: Personal pronouns in Japanese

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