the questions of our times: formality and vampires

[rm]

This, thanks to a discussion started by weirdquark. Please do visit the comments where you will learn many things including the many ways formality is structured in different languages (something my questions did not fully take into account, and I apologize for that), werewolf pack dynamics considerations, and whether there are vampires in France.

[Poll #1601631]

Comments

[trinker.livejournal.com]

ah, but at which level?

[shoiryu.livejournal.com]

Depends on setting/age/social/all kinds of things.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

*nod*

This is the thing. I don't know whether it's accurate, but I was taught that in French, German, and Spanish, there are essentially two registers (tu/vous, etc.) I would guess that there's some flex within those based on word choice, but that the divide is essentially binary.

It bugs me when I see a lot of people presenting the case in Japanese and Korean as if it were similarly binary, when my experience is that it's very, very multi-layered.

[shoiryu.livejournal.com]

Well I could have made a long comment about how it would depend on if I was a vampire of an older age or if I looked older than the vampire's age and we were pretending the vampire wasn't ancient, and also what gender the vampire was and also what sort of relationship we might already have or if we'd just met and ALSO whether or not I was wealthy or the vampire wasn't or vice versa and also on how I wanted to come off (as cultured or well mannered or if I didn't care if I was being more casual) and also whether or not I or the vampire was in a friendly mood. But I'm headachey and quite tired and generally not in the habit of lecturing people a whole bunch about languages they don't know out of nowhere, which is why my responses to the poll were similarly vague! "If you don't know them well you are formal!" is nonetheless generally true in both languages. Ssssso yeah?

[trinker.livejournal.com]

Oh, not indicating that you should have said anything specific...just that I wish more people were aware that there are multiple possible levels in some languages.

[shoiryu.livejournal.com]

Haha, okay. I was like WTF? for a minute there.

What I wish actually is less emphasis on the INCREDIBLY RIGID FORMALITY OMFG!!! in East Asian languages and more awareness that yeah no, using "formal" language in some settings is not another symbol of Asian repression. We do it in English too, after all.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

Love your icon, btw. There's not enough representation of beautiful hanja in the Anglosphere.

I think there's a bit of weird projection going on - English used to have a lot more formality structure going on, but there's been a trend toward informality, with a concurrent change in the culture. There's an assumption that East Asian languages are Just Like English (except more Exotic, and Stuck In The Past).

I found, much to my dismay, that in some ways, I've been speaking Japanese using English words all my life, and that it maps badly to someone with a Soviet Russian semantic space.

*Sigh*

[shoiryu.livejournal.com]

Thanks. :) It's actually the flag of the Shinsengumi! ("Makoto", which doesn't translate well at all, haha).

And yeah. To me honestly it's symbolic of the weird invisibility of anti-Asian racism -- like they are CLEARLY SO ALIEN FROM WHITE PEOPLE and so repressed and formal and it's ridiculous.

♥Russian. Took it once, forgot all of it except casual hellos and how to ask if one speaks English.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

Inscrutable Oriental, yo!

I'm a bit freaked at the prospect of putting my half-Japanese, blue-eyed for now baby daughter into a yukata at some point. It bugs me that it bugs me, but there you go.

I've had long discussions about anti-Asian racism. MANAA doesn't have nearly the currency that the JDL does, unfortunately.

(I was having a discussion about what to call hanzi/kanji/hanja elsenet. I defaulted to the Korean in writing to you, because my notification e-mail had your name in hangul. It's easy enough to figure out what to do *in* [h/k]an[zi/ji/ja], but to transliterate it into English?)

[shoiryu.livejournal.com]

I'm a bit freaked at the prospect of putting my half-Japanese, blue-eyed for now baby daughter into a yukata at some point. It bugs me that it bugs me, but there you go. It is what it is, and there are a lot of layers there. I hope that we get an environment soon that makes it easier for kids like your daughter, in all parts of the world.

(When I have to refer to it in general I usually just say "hanzi/kanji/hanja" but if I'm talking individually I'll do it by circumstance aka that's kanji in the icon because the context is Japanese. Just my personal way of trying to be as inclusive as possible! And yeah, I hate trying to explain these things in English. I see "Makoto" translated as everything from "friendship" to "loyalty" to, like, "calmness" or some crap. It's not riiiiight.)

[trinker.livejournal.com]

I'm hoping to work out some of the weirdnesses that my daughter can expect before she's old enough to ask the questions or experience the issues. My son is far more typically Eurasian looking, and that stuff I'd worked on long before he was even thought of.

Your workaround is pretty much mine, in practice. I only do the geeky [] version when I'm sick of typing out the whole.

Makoto...it's one of those things that leads to the "inscrutable, exotic" tag. Alas. (As if there weren't terms in other languages that are hard to translate into other cultures.) I like WWWJDIC's translation best. (Truth/sincerity)

[shoiryu.livejournal.com]

Man, "sincerity" is a pretty great match, actually...!

[trinker.livejournal.com]

It's my favorite J-E dictionary for a reason.