118 CHAPTER 3. MORE GRAMMARYou may have noticed that and are not listed here. The
absence of is easy to explain because it is the copula, and one cannot
want something to be a particular property in Japanese using the copula
(this uses the adjective
instead, explained later in this section on
desiratives). The absence of a form for is more subtle: there is no
form for because using to express one’s desire is intrinsi-
cally selfish, and thus mutually exclusive with polite phrasing. To make a
statement that expresses desire that is less selfish, the Japanese use a con-
struction that expresses ”I think I want/would like to ...”, which makes the
actual desire less strong because it’s only a thought, rather than a ’genuine’
desire:
”I think I would like to buy a new car.”This is a very civil way of expressing one’s own desire, compared
to the plain:”I want to buy a new car.”Because is an adjective, it can also be followed by to make
it more polite, in which case the translation stays the same, but the per-
ceived strength of the desire is tuned down just a bit, although not as much
as when the desire is turned into a thought using + +.”I want to buy a new car.”To say one doesn’t want something, all we have to do is form the
negative of , which we know is :”I don’t want to do anything today.”Second and third person desirative:Because of the way Japanese works, and the way the world is interpreted
and thought about in the Japanese mindset, one never presumes to truly
know what’s going on in someone else’s head. Because of this, you cannot
say that ”Bob wants an apple”, because even though he might give off all