Japan rocks my socks
1 May 2006 09:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fencer_xOk, so I’m doing research for my linguistics paper (due tomorrow, stop looking at me like that, it’s gonna ROCK), and I’m reading through this awesome book, and come upon a section dealing with the merging of the sounds “shi” and “hi” sounds among Shitamichi speakers (the ‘downtown’ Tokyo-ites, from the older section of town), considered a substandard substitution among those of the uptown ‘Yamanote’ area. Here I quote from the book I’m reading:
“There is also an interesting lexical shift that is apparently related to the [h sh] merger. Many Yamanote speakers say futon wo hiku to mean ‘spread out the futon.’ The ‘correct’ verb is shiku ‘spread out,’ but hiku ‘pull’ is also semantically reasonable, since a futon is folded up for storage and must be pulled on to spread it for use. This use of hiku almost certainly originated as a hypercorrection by speakers with only shi in their native dialects. In attempting to imitate the prestige standard, such speakers are likely to go too far and replace some standard shi sequences with hi. Because of the semantic plausibility of hiku in this particular case, it has caught on to some extent among standard speakers, and the desire to avoid sounding like a Shitamachi speaker probably works in favor of hiku. Even if a Yamanote speaker knows that shiku is ‘correct,’ there is always the danger that it will be taken as a stigmatized pronunciation of hiku by listeners.”
…Wow O_O To think that the Japanese psyche delves that far into their language…I mean, it’s like saying, “I know that X is the right way to say the word, but everyone else will think I’m stupid/uppity/just-plain-wrong if I say it that way, so I’ll say it Y like everyone else.”
…WTF JAPAN XD
“There is also an interesting lexical shift that is apparently related to the [h sh] merger. Many Yamanote speakers say futon wo hiku to mean ‘spread out the futon.’ The ‘correct’ verb is shiku ‘spread out,’ but hiku ‘pull’ is also semantically reasonable, since a futon is folded up for storage and must be pulled on to spread it for use. This use of hiku almost certainly originated as a hypercorrection by speakers with only shi in their native dialects. In attempting to imitate the prestige standard, such speakers are likely to go too far and replace some standard shi sequences with hi. Because of the semantic plausibility of hiku in this particular case, it has caught on to some extent among standard speakers, and the desire to avoid sounding like a Shitamachi speaker probably works in favor of hiku. Even if a Yamanote speaker knows that shiku is ‘correct,’ there is always the danger that it will be taken as a stigmatized pronunciation of hiku by listeners.”
…Wow O_O To think that the Japanese psyche delves that far into their language…I mean, it’s like saying, “I know that X is the right way to say the word, but everyone else will think I’m stupid/uppity/just-plain-wrong if I say it that way, so I’ll say it Y like everyone else.”
…WTF JAPAN XD
