142 CHAPTER 3. MORE GRAMMAR
this difference is striking. For instance, a person whose glasses are so dirty
they can’t really see any of the things we point out to them might say:
”I can’t (really) see (it).”This is hardly anything to worry about as the potential form used
is one associated with temporary impairment. However, if they had used:
We would have good reason to apologise for telling them to look at
something; they’re blind.
3.3 Formality: humble/honorific speech paĴerns
In addition to being polite, in formal Japanese, a dreadfully important as-
pect is to use the right mix ofhumble(
) andhonorific(
) speech
paĴerns. In part, this is expressed by picking the right words to use, but
in part it also depends on which verb inflections you pick. One can ar-
gue whether this belongs in a reader that should serve as introduction to
Japanese, as it’s a rather advanced subject, but I would argue that in terms
of how verbs can generically be made humble or honorific, the rules are
relatively straight forward. What makes it an advanced topic is not how to
do it, but how to do it in such a way that a native speaker doesn’t raise an
eyebrow at it. And that’s hard enough to make even Japanese people get
it wrong once they need to start using it.
Humble and honorific paĴerns are significantly different from po-
liteness. This can be made fairly obvious using an English example. Com-
pare the following sentences:
”I would like to humbly offer my apologies.””I do apologise.””Sorry.”Of these, the first sentence is humble, polite English. The second
sentence is merely polite, and the third is essentially neutral. It’s not really