Wed 30 Jul 2008
Posted by jangari under Honorifics, Japanese, Languages, Linguistics
[6] Comments
A letter arrived at the Sydney University Linguistics department just the other day from Japan, and the way the addressee was worded impressed me immensely, as It’s the first time I’ve experienced real-life honorifics.
Curiously, a day later, I found the unopened letter in the bin, as though no one in the building thought of themselves as honorable or responsible.
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If you're still reading all this then perhaps you have a fetish for small print.
July 30th, 2008 at 10:41 am
That is odd that you found it in the trash. It does make one question the honor and responsibility of the person who threw it out…You’d think they’d be at least curious enough to open it and see if it should be directed to someone specific (whether or not that person had the desired attributes).
So, my question is, as an honorable and responsible person (as I believe you to be), did you open the letter? Because you could certainly make an argument for it being addressed to you as much as to anyone else in the department.
July 30th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
Alejna, you’re so cool. I did in fact remove it from the rubbish bin (it wasn’t even put in the recycling!) and, believing myself to be sufficiently honorable and responsible, I did open it. I found that it was a serious correspondence that should have been directed to someone in particular – that is, the sender didn’t know who should have received it, but anyone who opened it would have deduced the right person for it to go to.
So, being said horonable and responsible person, I put the contents in their pigeon hole… and scanned the envelope.
July 30th, 2008 at 4:06 pm
Is everyone else in the lx dept p.o’d because he/she isn’t ‘the honorable reponsible person’?
July 30th, 2008 at 7:09 pm
Hope, according to TB, there are responsible people in the department, and there are a couple of honorable people in the department, but the department lacks anyone who is both honorable and responsible.
Perhaps the fact that I opened it says more about my modesty than anything else.
August 2nd, 2008 at 3:49 pm
Here‘s a really extreme example of honorific language that I discussed some time ago.
December 28th, 2008 at 12:39 am
Evidently, the letter was addressed to an unknown (duh!) member of the Honorable Society… :->
Oh yeah, France, where you can still get letters that end in “Veuillez agréer, Monsieur, à l’expression de mes sentiments distingués”. The formulas are getting more diverse and shorter, sometimes all the way to the suspiciously English-looking “Sincèrement”, but even “[...] les plus distingués” was sighted in the wild not long ago.