Status Updates From Japanese Language, Gender, ...

I can't make too hard of a judgment, because I've never read anything written during the Meiji era in Japanese, I doubt I could, but this certainly isn't true of modern literature. So at what point did the status switch?

This actually disagrees with other works in this volume that talk about how honorific endings are required in writing..so..? Is this just historical? She certainly doesn't frame it as such.

"Polite and honorific verb-ending forms, which formally indexed context-bound relationships between the author and the reader and between the author and the characters, eventually lost their status in the serious literary style."

Again. Examples? That would be nice.

I can't believe I found this article convincing in grad school.

first of all she said that by the 1910s plain verb endings such as -da had won out as the established literary style.

Maybe it had in the 1910s, but it certainly isn't now. And where is the evidence that this is true? She doesn't give a single example. No excerpts. No surveys. Just her feelings.

I just read the world's most rambling paragraph and am sitting back in astonishment at how my younger self found post structuralism to be convincing.

Just because you redefine commonly understood words to mean something completely different doesn't rescue you from inherently circular arguments.

This particular author seems to think that governments and institutions are a) a lot more competent and efficient than they actually are and that b) they use those powers to effect structured social change...

I think she overestimates them.

"Women's language is also a national issue, a reflexive parameter of civil order and of social change. Nationwide opinion polls are regularly conducted on whether "women's language: is becoming corrupted and how much so; national sentiments over its perceived disappearance are thereby crystallized and circulated in the form of numbers and statistics."

Oh. I should clarify, this book is also beautifully cited, I'm just reading it as research rather than as non fiction, so it wasn't in my mental category of 'nonfiction.'

Anyway.

"Japanese women's language is a socially powerful truth. I mean by this not that the phrase refers to the empirical speech patterns of women. Rather...it is a critical cultural category and an unavoidable part of practical social knowledge

"One cannot characterize women's speech as more polite than men's in the abstract simply because the former is presumed to contain more honorifics than the latter."

Interestingly enough she says nonreciprocal use of honorifics from lower to higher is disappearing in Japan, rather people are reciprocating to decrease the hierarchical difference.

....I think she doesn't read manga, because WOW, it's still there.

"Politeness should be viewed as involving moral judgements rather than as an objective system of rules, strategies, or principles that is assumed to govern speakers' behavior. It is thus important to examine why and how such judgements are made."

"These how-to books thus promote the notion that women's attractiveness depends on their appearance (beauty), which is in part determined by their good upbringing and education, including the knowledge of honorifics."

This is probably true, one of my samples of manga is a Pretty Cure spinoff where all of these silver spoon young ladies are in a boarding school and their language is INCREDIBLY formal and stilted.

"There are also numerous books, magazine articles, and other materials on how to use honorifics 'correctly', which suggests that knowledge of honorifics is not evenly distributed in the society and that many native speakers aspire to acquire it, because they consider it linguistic capital for improving their social status."

No one ever asks 'why' in these studies.

Women have no place in society, therefore they are more aware and concerned about appearances.

Uh. Egalitarian societies still tend to have women concerned of and aware of appearances. The question is WHY women are concerned about appearances, if it is something that is universal, and it certainly seems so, to the point that it's in the animal kingdom, the question is WHY?

Ooooh!
Finally! I'm actually learning something from this book. I knew about 尊敬語 and 謙譲語 but 美化語 is new to me.

Makes complete sense. Onaka tsuita. Isn't lifting up the stomach, it's just making it sound prettier.

You're damned if you make the sex of a woman, you're damned if you don't.

Feminist linguistic studies, the ultimate expression of the phrase 'shifting the goal posts'.

I can't wait to read one that says having a gender system is the ultimate franchisement of women.

Gosh. You cannot win.

This is one book about feminism "She identified several conventional sexist practices, including (1) unnecessarily marking women 'female company president' etc."

The other feminist book, about erasing women from data sets gets made because they just say 'doctor' or 'president' instead of 'female doctor' because obviously everyone just imagines a male if you say 'doctor' or 'president.'

Wow. I found something I agreed with in this book!

to paraphrase: Not enough linguists go out and look at actual language use.

So true!

The difference is that I find this in all linguists, she seems to only find it among those she disagrees with. I wonder if she disagrees with...oh, who was it that wrote the entire book on questionnaires of what women think is gendered language? Maynard?...no...Takemaru!

"topics chosen specifically for a female audience. Women's magazines are filled with articles on fashion, homemaking, and the private affairs of celebrities."

Yes. Is this because they are chosen specifically for a female audience, or is it because this is what female audiences are interested in?

"(3) an abundant use of the second-person pronoun anata 'you' instead of ellipsis to directly address the reader, which -being a typical feature of advertisements-treats women as if they were more susceptible to insincere seduction."

I wonder if she considered genre or register at all, because I think mine is showing the opposite, more pronoun usage in male targeted speech. But, maybe not.

"(2) a smaller number of proper nouns, which implies that women are less interested than men in learning about the world,"

...how? That's a seriously big jump.

"The first component of onnarashii kotoba is language used with a female audience in mind. Jugaku's quantitative study of women's magazines had revealed some distinctive stylistic features, including (1) a greater percentage of exclamatory and uncompleted sentences, which reflects a belief in women's emotionality and lack of logical thinking..."

It could also reflect a belief in women's superior ability to decode