3.3. FORMALITY: HUMBLE/HONORIFIC SPEECH PATTERNS 143
polite, nor is it humble, but then it’s not offensive either. Of course, we can
mix these paĴerns to produce something that sounds odd to our ears:
”I would like to humbly say sorry.”This sentence mixes humble form with neutral terms. This sounds
very odd to an English speaker, and likewise mixing humble or honorific
speech without using the appropriate politeness to match will sound odd
in Japanese, but it can be done, just as in English.
3.3.1 Humble (paĴerns)
When one addresses someone who stands much higher on the social ladder
than oneself (in a particular seĴing), it is customary to lower one’s own
status by using humble speech. Humble speech applies to everything that
has to do with oneself; not just verb actions, but also opinion and things
requiring copula statements.
The way to turn any old verb into a humble variant is relatively
straight forward: the honorific particle (pronounced for most verbs,
and for noun+ verbs where the noun uses
reading), is pre-
fixed to the verb in form, and suffixed either with , or the ex-
plicitly humble counterpart to ,
. When is used, the honorary
prefix can sometimes be omiĴed for a slightly less formal humble form, but
when is used, it has to be present.
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