How come the msq keeps using big words?

[Eloah]

I guess the best way they could think of to directly translate that into English was to use things like thou/thee/thy/thine and all that?? Since English doesn’t have anything like polite forms versus casual forms the way Japanese does; and thou/thee/thy/thine were once used in English as pronouns. Though, ironically, they conveyed intimacy with the other party one was speaking to, as opposed to being used for politeness (which would imply social/personal distance between two speakers)—so, technically, they can be argued as casual forms. If one was to consider their actual use back in the day.

Funny enough, in Early Modern English, “ye” was the formal counterpart to “thou”. Now, it’s overwhelmingly casual in the few areas it’s still used it (it’s mostly colloquial now), and “thou” is seen as more formal due to its use in religious texts; but when the pronouns were actually in spoken English, it was the opposite.

Sorry. I nerded out a bit there.

You nerd out all you need to. We all need to learn about our own language and others. And similar to what Iscah said, and what others have implied, a lot of the English terms used today were once the formal versions of words.

That's the main difference between the Japanese and English versions, the formality. In Japanese they still use a system of separation in their speech, Keigo, as some might know. But there are a lot of differences between the various types of Keigo. To understand it, in school you just learn a "basic" version, so that when you get a job, you can learn job specific Keigo. Think of it like job terminology, but for everyday speech.

With English on the other hand, most of the "formalities" were phased into regular speech, as a way of making everyone feel equal I guess. We could walk up and meet the Queen of England and talk very similar to how we'd speak to a random stranger. Well most of us, some of us have no manners, lol.

Plus on the subject of Urianger. His speech is more of an idiocracy than him trying to be polite. As someone said, either here or in another thread, his speech was a product of his upbringing.

EDIT: I suppose if one really wanted to try and reach, they could argue that Urianger is being intimate and familiar with the Scions...but I don’t think that really flies; since it directly contradicts the way he speaks in Japanese (overly formal and polite). So I’d wager it was just localization falling into the trap I quoted above. It has its charm, but it’s still funny to think about how it’s technically not as formal as they likely hoped for it to seem.

However, it’s unlikely most English speakers would ever know that. I didn’t really learn about it until I took a History of the English Language course for my linguistics minor. I thought it was very funny—and now I can’t unsee it lol.

Funny thing about Japanese. You could say the rudest things using Keigo, or the nicest things using informal speech. It's the trap of it's not what you say but how you say it. I'd have to see an example, or several to get an idea, but Urianger could still be showing a sense of familiarity while being overly formal and polite. Ultimately, that's all the various types of Japanese boils down to, the degree of seperation between you and the listener. I mean there is even a version of Japanese that is "neutral" when seperation doesn't matter, like in emergencies.

[HyoMinPark]

You nerd out all you need to. We all need to learn about our own language and others. And similar to what Iscah said, and what others have implied, a lot of the English terms used today were once the formal versions of words.

That's the main difference between the Japanese and English versions, the formality. In Japanese they still use a system of separation in their speech, Keigo, as some might know. But there are a lot of differences between the various types of Keigo. To understand it, in school you just learn a "basic" version, so that when you get a job, you can learn job specific Keigo. Think of it like job terminology, but for everyday speech.

With English on the other hand, most of the "formalities" were phased into regular speech, as a way of making everyone feel equal I guess. We could walk up and meet the Queen of England and talk very similar to how we'd speak to a random stranger. Well most of us, some of us have no manners, lol.

Plus on the subject of Urianger. His speech is more of an idiocracy than him trying to be polite. As someone said, either here or in another thread, his speech was a product of his upbringing.

Speaking on keigo, that was one of the hardest things to learn in my Japanese study—and we just learned the most basic ways of using it; there are likely still a lot of nuances that only first-hand exposure would teach someone. Mostly because, once you started learning it, you then had to compartmentalize a separate verb conjugation for words (and, in some cases, new verbs entirely); and it was something a lot of people struggled with. However, it can really impress the Japanese if an English speaker even attempts to use keigo properly, so there is that.

You also had to understand how to properly use honorific forms and humble forms. Some verbs have their standard polite forms (desu/-masu forms), but also honorific forms for you to use with superiors (to say that they “honorably” or “respectfully” do something) and humble forms for you to use for yourself or your inner circle (to say that you “humbly” do something).

The formality in English has largely vanished—at least, with regards to differentiations of separate forms to linguistically distinguish distance between people. It is possible to word things in a more “formal” or “polite” way, but we don’t have separate words for “formal [pronoun]” or “formal [verb]” the way Japanese does.


As an aside, my History of the English Language class was probably one of my favorite classes I took. Learning about the evolution of my own language was far more fascinating than I thought it would be.