There is a saying in Russian that Ya [Я] is the last letter of the alphabet because it is the least used. This is a reference to the fact that it is also the first person pronoun, I.

Obviously the verb form with tell you if you are speaking in the first person, so it isn’t necessary to the meaning, but it also is a reminder that you shouldn’t get too self-centered. This is a Russian trait, not a Soviet attitude.

Actually the normal way of expressing the concepts of possession and fondness for things involves indirection, i.e. ‘I have something’ is said ‘Something is by/near me’; and ‘I like something’ is said ‘Something is pleasing to me’. It is an entirely different mind set.

There are a lot of words in every language that are references to well-known historical or mythical events in that culture, but meaningless without the context.

Given all of the space for misunderstanding, it is surprising that there are any international agreements.

OK, As well as “no”, Japanese will usually avoid saying “you” (anata) and “I” (which is more complicated as there is no *single* Japanese word for “I”).

Watashi : The standard (non-gender) word for “I”, and generally the one beginners use. It is also the less-formal version of the formal “watakushi”.

Boku : This is the soft-masculine version. (literally, “manservant”. Used when you are being humble before the speaker, generally used by a man speaking to a superior).

Ore : The hard-masculine version. It’s generally only used by men who are acting tough!

Atashi : The informal effeminate version. (Oh! this one has no kanji form as kanji is generally a masculine form. It’s only seen in hiragana or katakana.) 😉

Other common ways Japanese say “I” are:

Uchi : It is generally used as an informal feminine version when the woman want’s to avoid the implied *cuteness* of ‘atashi’. It literally means “inside” (don’t ask me!) 😉

OK. The next two I heard often as they are generally use in Business. 🙂

Kocchi : Literally means “this way”. It’s informal and usually used amongst friends or well known associates. It’s also used to mean “we” because it’s ambiguous with regard to number.

Kochira : Whilst the same word as “Kocchi” (which is simply the shortened form), it is only used formally or when being highly polite.

And, i discovered this one accidentally! 😀

Washi – It’s used only by elderly man, or men who have slurred speach! (again, don’t ask me!) 😆

And, something we don’t do in Inglish (unless one is quite strange or is being an a*hole) use their name to indicate “I”. Generally used by children, and it’s use by adults is frowned upon.

And… there are others that are no longer in general use (it was explained to me!) Some are actually period specific and were banned by succeeding rulers! One was a form of “I” only used by Samurai and another version only by a Samurai’s wife.

Ahhh… Japanese was fun! 😀

I learned German as a child (via a German Uncle/Aunt that I spent a lot of time with). They have several strange words that we have no word-equivalent of. 🙂

I should say that whilst the Japanese (generally) don’t like using the word “no”, the word does exist.
Formal: iie
Less-formal: ie
Informal: iya

And whilst Arabic doesn’t have an actual word equivalent for the English “compromise”, they do have the word “Taarradhin” which is used to describe reaching an arrangement via struggle and disagreement. It’s used to imply a happy solution for everyone, without anyone being harmed. 🙂

I also should have added, that like Europe, the US States hardly ever agree on anything (with the possible exception of War). 😛

As well as culture Bryan, Region has a lot to play in language also. When people ask me what it was like in the USA for example, one thing I usually say to highlight it is that it’s a bit like Europe. Each State has it’s own language, law’s and *rules*! 😆

One of the Russian words that stuck in my mind (that doesn’t have an English equivalent), is “Pochemuchka ” (sp?) which is used to describe someone who asks a lot of questions (not a word you want to hear in the spy biz!) 😉 😀

When I first went to Japan, I had to have a tutor. As well as dialects, they have different language and usage depending in the person’s hierarchy. Generally (I was told) there are 3 levels, formal, less-formal and informal (as you pointed out Bryan). I also had to learn “the 16 ways to avoid using the word ‘no'” as Japanese (especially very senior) don’t like to hear it. One word I heard several times there was ‘Yoko meshi’ (which literally means “a meal eaten sideways”), but is used to indicate the stress of speaking a foreign language. 🙂

I learned in the Mid-East that Arabic has no actual word for “compromise”. And so on.

Thankfully, it all kept me out of trouble (well, except for that one time in Texas… But… *shrug*) 😆

Which reminds me of how the parochialism of Americans affects their ability to think — or not think — “out of the box” so to speak. At various times I’ve been minimally fluent in French and Spanish (to the point of being able to think in them at times), and learning a language isn’t just about translating things to your native language, it is about learning a new way of thinking. Ser and estar in Spanish are a good example. The difference between them doesn’t translate into English. I could pretty much automatically choose the correct one based on the permanence of the existence without thinking about it. But you don’t even think about the permanence of existence of a condition as a concept in English. There simply is no easy way to codify such a concept in the English language. And while personally as a decided nonconformist I’m not a fan of Japanese culture as a whole, understanding something about how a totally alien (to me) culture operates to the point of learning at least some of the language that describes the concepts I’m observing helps keep me from getting intellectually stale.

Of course, even intellectually stale requires there to be an intellect there to begin with, and I’m suspecting that for far too many Boobus Americanus, there is no “there” there :twisted:.

Any language can only be truly understood in the context of the culture. My first Russian course was military Russian, the second was Soviet Russian, and it wasn’t until the third, Advanced Course, that we actually dealt with Russian Russian, the actual language that everyday Russians used as they went about their lives. All of the instructors were native speakers and they came from a variety of backgrounds.

It wasn’t until the third course that early Russian cinema and literature started to make sense and you ‘got’ a lot of the jokes that were published in Russian magazines. Military and Soviet Russian are very correct and formal languages, but real Russians aren’t that dedicated to grammar, so the colloquial language is different in many ways. Understanding dialogue requires you to understand the real spoken language.

Actually, I think that Japanese is all that and more because things are noticeably different depending on the status of those who can hear you. Even though I didn’t pick up more than the ‘tourist necessary phrases’ in Japanese, it was noticeable when Japanese of different status were trying to help you. Americans who were fluent in Japanese also changed their language depending on who they were talking to. That isn’t in a book. You have to be there to understand how you determine what the status on an individual is, and how you interact them. After you finish with the linguistics, you have to get involved with the sociology. It isn’t easy to master even though the basics of the language are easy.

As for the historic reasons for all this, the original Japanese writing system was the Chinese writing system (kanji) since the Chinese brought literacy to Japan over two thousand years ago. But Chinese ideographs were not ideal for expressing everything in the Japanese language, thus hiragana. Then foreign words and concepts had to be expressed, but for some reason rather than extending hiragana they created katakana. The lack of a strong central government for much of Japan’s history undoubtedly has something to do with this too, the hangul alphabet for Korean was created via Imperial decree but for most of Japan’s history there was no strong Emperor capable of making and enforcing such a decree. The other issue faced if typesetting Japanese is that traditional Japanese is vertical, like traditional Chinese, and read from right to left. Luckily with the advent of typewriters and computers the ever-pragmatic Japanese have pretty much moved to normal left-to-right horizontal input, though you’ll still see signs and WW2-era posters and such that had/have right-to-left horizontal arrangement like Hebrew or Arabic. And finally there is the word recognition issue. Traditionally Japanese has not used spacing to denote word boundaries. Not a problem with kanji, since each glyph is an entire word, but the phonetic alphabets make word recognition a bit problematic. My guess is that this may be one reason why two phonetic alphabets persist, if you flip from one alphabet to the other in mid-sentence that’s pretty much a firm indication of a word boundary. Toss in kanji, each of which is a word in and of itself, and it tends to sort itself out in a demented sort of way.

Japanese itself from what I can tell appears to be a rather easy language, despite being totally alien to speakers of European languages. There are of course cultural differences that come into play. If you watch dubbed Japanese movies or television shows you will inevitably hear the word ‘Hai!’ accompanied by a slight bow or nod. What that means depends on context. Reading the English dub is always amusing at that point, since the concept of honorable/respectful agreement/greeting/response expressed by that word is not readily translatable to English. Just goes to show you can’t learn everything about a language from from instructional books, you have to understand how it is used in the culture too, which typically is going to require some exposure to actual users of the language in a cultural context somehow…

I didn’t test that as I use a non-Microsoft package for Russian because the M$ package doesn’t conform to the model I was trained to use in the military.

As you noted in your post, written Japanese is a challenge because they use three different symbol sets in the written language. There is probably a logical reason they have developed this way, but it is a major barrier to communication and keyboard design.

Anything to squeeze more money from their customers – that’s the M$ ‘vision statement’.