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So... 好く is a real word, it would seem. Which means I incorrectly corrected a boy when he was translating my worksheet assignment today, and I will have to issue a retraction. I'll probably do it on the announcements so that I have the class' attention (I want to make sure that they don't get confused by my officially given translation on the blackboard, which was basically love instead of like). But anyways, it bugs me that I never noticed this word before, despite Mai always saying 好かん (I don't like it!) (I just thought it was hakata-ben)(don't get it into your head that she was saying she didn't like me!)(four parenthetical statements: bad grammar, or awesome grammar?). The issue got a little muddled because before class, a teacher and I got back into the thing about whether 好き is a verb. Most Japanese people tend to think it is, despite looking nothing like a verb. But in their minds it is 好む or 好く, more or less. And if we factor in the fact that だ is more or less a helper verb, 好きだ is very easy to see as a verb.--by the way, Bobby, if you are reading this, which I doubt you are while you are building houses in India, I have encountered a 国語先生 that thinks of na-adjectives as not 形容動詞 until you get that だ or な on there. Thought you'd like to know, though you won't, cause you can't read this. All aboard the digression train! Oh wait it already left!--But the question remains, why don't I ever see 好く? My best guess is it just sounds like too many other things, so people favor 好き. What do you think, lovely reader, with full red lips I could kiss? That was weird. Why did I say that? Still like this entry? Or are you going back to that Boing Boing* tramp? Okay, I have totally lost my Japanese readers now (as opposed to my readers of Japanese. No, wait, they're both gone).
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So, I thought a section on how Japanese is written, from Wikipedia, was interesting. Therefore, lets have some passages and my reactions!
ニュアンスを伝える日本語表記系Okay, fair enough, but I have to point out that other languages have tools such as italics, fonts, elitist French and Latin words, color, and CAPITAL PRINT to convey nuances. But yes, Japanese can get pretty fun when you mess with the characters you choose to write in, and perhaps less jarring than some of the methods I just mentioned.
他の言語では説明を追加したり単語自体を変更したりしなければならない情報でも、日本語の表記システムを用いれば同じ単語の表記を変えるだけで伝えることができる場合がある。例えば英語の「 I 」、ドイツ語の「 Ich 」、ロシア語の「 Я 」に相当する「私」は男女兼用でフォーマルな文章にしばしば用いられる。ひらがなで書いた「わたし」は、優しい感じがするので、男女ともにインフォーマルな場や、親しみやすさを表現したい場合に使用される。例えば、女性が日記や友人への手紙で用いるなどは、その典型である。
カタカナの「ワタシ」はほとんど用いられず(時々一人称を強調する時や、外国人が片言で話すニュアンスを出す場合に用いられることがある)Yeah what the article doesn't tell you is how much it pisses you off to read the local paper and see that all your quotes are in katakana implying that you speak Japanese as well as an animal. At least that's how we feel.
Yeah Soseki drove me a bit crazy at first because I didn't know he was gonna be pulling this sort of thing. I was like, is this an archaic way of saying it? Imagine if we could get away with this in English. Printing something like "connection(tied)." Well, looks kind of annoying in English, but furigana can make it seem natural in Japanese somehow. Another thing you can do with written Japanese is have a word with foreign pronunciation implied by furigana. Like 獣化兵（ゾアノイド）(the Zoanoids from Guyver).
文体上の狙いで漢字の複合語を恣意的に読ませることもできる。例えば夏目漱石は短編『十五夜』の中で名詞の「接続」を動詞的に活用した「接続って」を「つながって」と読ませている。これは通常ならば「繋がって」「つながって」と書くものである。
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Promised whatever:
I am finally getting into Battlestar Galactica. It is pretty good, but my theory that all SF movies and TV shows are kinda stupid is holding up. It is odd to me that the suave scientist is the only humorous character (gruff doc doesn't count). Don't get me wrong, he's my fav, but the rest of the show kinda doesn't match. They had one oddly funny scene, complete with stereotypical musical cues in season one, but otherwise melodrama. And I hate Lee. And I'm in love with many Cylons. And there shouldn't be so many episodes stringing things out, giving us stupid stories like Lee the detective. I fracking hate Lee.
Bonus fact: Did you know that the original series, and consequently this one, are littered with reference to Mormon concepts?
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*I stopped reading Boing Boing because I already had seen everything they wrote about. I really may be the king of the internet, as someone recently labeled me.
Take this with a grain of salt. I'm no specialist but because I know several languages and old Japanese, I think I know Japanese and its grammer better than an average Japanese. First, in old Japanese, the verb conjugation system was quite different from that in modern Japanese. In that, suki was effectively a verb conjugating like, suka(mizenkei), suki(renyoukei), suku(shuushikei), suku(rentaikei), suke(izenkei), suke(meireikei). This group of conjugation is called yo(4)dankatsuyou.
ReplyDeleteNow, very often, in regional dialect, there remain some remnants of old Japanese. I think sukan is a case. In old Japanese, suku(shuushikei) changed like suka(mizenkei) +zu(meaning negaition). sukan is a variant of this.
However, I think today's suki is not a verb. It can't conjugate. Even, in the dialect, you only have the form sukan or suka nai(maybe) without other conjugations.
In short, today's suki is, as you think, a keiyou-doushi, in my view.
The entire form is suki-da or -desu. It's similar to kirei-da.
Wow, I've never thought about it. I simply had believed 好き& 嫌い were verbs. But you are right, they are not exactly so. Usually verbs end with the vowel, う.
ReplyDeleteI guess 好き& 嫌い are more like description about one's emotional state associated with pleasure and displeasure cuased by preference. 好む& 嫌う are the verbs. 好くis rarely used for contemporary writing. I even cannot think about any proper example of the sentence using 好く.
You can be accepted as only a novelty, you know that. Because they think you are not a threat as long as you are a novelty. But that does not happen only in Japan. In U.S. any minorities are constantly stereotyped. Stereotyping means de-humanizing. As long as the majority(means White in U.S.) can believe others are inferior, they are happy and comfortable.
Japanese are happy when they hear gaijins speaking crappy Japanese because they can believe only Japanese are smart enough to speak Japanese.
You can be truly respected only by being like Dave Spector or Jero as they show they are much more talented than average Japanese. But then that is just another type of novelty.
I do think Human beings have a fundamental desire to be accepted.
As most of immigrants in U.S. came for financial opportunities, making it is more important than being fully accepted for them.
However, most of gaijins did not come to Japan for that, they leave when they realized they can not be fully accepted.
The ones who have stayed for a long time must have learned to enjoy being a novelty or being cynical and sarcastic like I do.
i tend to agree with both naoki ("In short, today's suki is, as you think, a keiyou-doushi, in my view. ") AND blue ("I guess 好き& 嫌い are more like description about one's emotional state associated with pleasure and displeasure cuased by preference."). at least from those two sentences, they're pretty much saying the same thing (right?).
ReplyDeletethe only exception i've run into using 好き as a form of the verb 好く is 好かれる which would be the passive form, meaning "to be liked". other than that, it's almost always used 好きだ or 好きじゃない which would imply it's more of a -な adjective...???
ah, i don't know. (i may be a little tipsy for these kinds of conversations...but i thought i'd comment anyway.)
and, long live parentheses!