Last semester, we learned that in Japanese pronouns could be remembered in sets. たとえば. これ、それ、あれ、どれ。この、その、あの、どの。こちら、そちら、あちら、どちら。
This morning, at 5AM, I was awakened by a tap, tap, tapping on the door. At first, I though I was dreaming. Then, I thought it might be burglars, but decided they wouldn't knock. Finally, seeing what time it was, I realized it must be JQS returning from work. I answered the door and there he was. He had lost his keys.
Sitting on the couch, trying to go back to sleep, I was remembering teaching English. "The boy went to school at 7 o'clock." "Who went to school? Where did he go? When did he go?" That kind of thing. How much more difficult it is in English to connect those question words with those pronouns. How could I have helped my students to remember?"
Then I thought, "When? Then. Where? There. What? That. Who? Thou." "Why" doesn't follow the pattern very well, unless you say "Why? Thy will be done." Sort of silly, but isn't it odd that I'd never noticed the pattern before, probably because of the pronunciation shifts. No one says "thou" for "you" anymore and "what" and "that" don't rhyme. I wonder if they used to.
Posted by M Sinclair Stevens
February 05, 2003
Comments
sometimes when studying japanese, I tend to think of all the sentence scenario that can happen in english but then try to construct it in japanese, seems to be a tough job. Since japanese has this vagueness, is always wondering is a common japanese sentence can be applied to 2 different english sentence pointing to a situation.
Comment by: pikey. Posted February 8, 2003 11:04 PM.
Steve H. left an interesting comment on "you" and "thou" in the annotations for "Pepys's Diary. He says that "thou" is the informal of "you" and that by Pepys day only the Quakers still used it...as an expression of their belief of the equality of all.
Comment by: M. Posted February 11, 2003 09:59 PM.
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