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くださいまし / いいえ

eeky

先輩
8 Jun 2010
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Hi,


1. 「それから、中に何が見えるか、教えてくださいましな ・・・・」

What is くださいまし? Obviously I recognise that it is something to do with くださる, but I don't really understand the ending.


2.
「血は?ハグリッドが泣いていませんこと?」
「いいえ!」

The second speaker means to say, "No! There is no blood, and Hagrid is not sobbing!". However, I am confused why the answer to the second (negative) question should be いいえ and not はい. I had a previous similar question, and the solution in that case was to do with the "question" ending だろうね and not really being a proper question. Is こと a similar case?
 
1)
Have you ever seen くださいませ? くださいまし is a variation of it, and な is a sentence final particle. (This might be needless to say, but ませ is the imperative form of ます.)

2)
こと is a courtly women's dialect of か, as same as ましな.
For a negative question, いいえ is used when the speaker/answerer thinks the questioner expects "affirmative (血が流れているし、泣いている in this case)". Thus, はい、流れていません / 大丈夫です can be correct depending on the situation.
 
OK, thanks, actually I find now that I have note about this まし, except that I wrote it down as まっし. Do they both exist, or did I write it incorrectly?
 
Probably you are not wrong. まっし would be actually used in the book as a (dialectal) variation of まし.
 
While I still feel (rightly or wrongly) that Japanese grammar is overall simpler than English grammar, it seems to me that the number of small variations in spelling/phrasing, and the number of different ways to express basic constructs such as questions, imperatives, etc., is much greater in Japanese than in English. Constantly I seem to come across new variants. I guess it may be quite hard to answer, but do you feel the same? Does it seem to you that English is simpler in this respect than Japanese?
 
If you take a quick read through questions by English language learners, you'll see that a lot of grammar/phrasing you simply take for granted can actually be very difficult for a non-native speaker, particularly at the very casual or more formal/written ends of the scale. What you're experiencing is a natural bias - English feels easier because ('cause, 'cos, 'coz) even when you come across things like written out accents, or unfamiliar dialect, or archaic phrasing, you have an easier time of figuring it out. You're also presumably not keeping notes on any unfamiliar English grammatical patterns you come across.

Primarily this sort of thing tends to come up in dialogue (including internal dialogue), because fictional characters often have non-standard speech patterns for various reasons.

Here's some Will Self at the extreme end (Book of Dave, which is great but almost requires that you have at some point lived in London to understand all the references.)
Carl Devush,, spindle-shanked, bleach-blond, lampburnt, twelve years old, kicked up buff puffs of sand with his bare feet as he scampered along the path from the manor. Although it was still early in the first tariff, the foglamp had already bored through the cloud and boiled the dew off the island. As he gained height and looked back over his shoulder, Carl saw first the homely notch of Manna Ba, then the shrub-choked slopes of the Gayt rising up beyond it. The sea mist had retreated offshore, where it hovered, a white-grey bank merging with the blue screen above. Wot if Eye woz up vair, Carl thought, up vair lyke ve Flyin I?

Trainspotting:
Society invents a spurious convoluted logic tae absorb and change people whae's behaviour is outside its mainstream. Suppose that ah ken aw the pros and cons, know that ah'm gaunnae huv a short life, am ah sound mind, ectetera, ectetera, but still want tae use smack? They won't let ye dae it. They won't let ye dae it, because it's seen as a sign ay thir ain failure. The fact that ye jist simply choose tae reject whut they huv tae offer.

Or to go more classic, I reckon things like this would be enough to trip a learner of English up if they haven't seen them before:
Huckleberry Finn
ツ"Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And hain't that a big enough majority in any town?ツ"

Master and Commander:
"My dear creature, I have done with all debate."

Not to nag, but to be honest, I feel like your level is such that you ought to be able to google things like くださいまし and find these sort of answers yourself (it's also good practice to learn to read the explanations in Japanese). First hit I get is a yahoo question about "what is くださいまし" second is a wikipedia article with this explanation:
くださいませ、くださいまし 【助動詞】 「ください」を丁寧に言う表現。どちらかというと、お 嬢様や貴婦人の言葉である。「今度、宅へもおはこびく ださいまし」。

These things are not always so easy to google but it's a good habit to get into.
 
くださいまし / いいえ

I sometimes find myself thinking similar things, especially what seem to me repetitious questions on what is (to me) clearly archaic speech, colloquialisms, or dialect.

Then I remind myself what an astounding job he does. One mustn't overlook that he is primarily self-taught and (I presume) has never lived in Japan. There are damned few who have done as well or been as diligent and persistent.

Entirely aside from all that...

Though it is often recommended to read a translated book, as you can know the story ahead of time, he almost certainly could have saved himself a lot of work by selecting practically any postwar Japanese novel at random rather than having all that oddball Japanese thrown at him as part of the Harry Potter translation.

The katakana alone would rule it out for me. I open a book, see a lot of katakana, and I can't get that thing back on the shelf fast enough.
 
Not to nag, but to be honest, I feel like your level is such that you ought to be able to google things like くださいまし and find these sort of answers yourself (it's also good practice to learn to read the explanations in Japanese). First hit I get is a yahoo question about "what is ~まし" second is a wikipedia article with this explanation:

These things are not always so easy to google but it's a good habit to get into.
I understand perfectly well how to use Google. Japanese-language Google results are too hard for me to process. It takes me a huge amount of time to understand the text that I alight on, or its broad context, or to figure out whether it answers my question. Sometimes useful English-language results are available; sometimes not. I don't know how you get that Yahoo question. I get nothing useful in English with various searches.
 
I sometimes find myself thinking similar things, especially what seem to me repetitious questions on what is (to me) clearly archaic speech, colloquialisms, or dialect.
Yeah, what is to you clearly etc. etc.. You have to remember that I have only learnt from textbooks. None of those textbooks touched in any way on archaic or dialect speech. When I hit a new ending, contraction, etc., and it is not look-uppable in the dictionary, and not listed in the main reference places where I look for grammar explanations, then I have no idea at all what it is or what style of speech it is.

If you find my questions repetitious then please feel free not to read them.
 
If you take a quick read through questions by English language learners, you'll see that a lot of grammar/phrasing you simply take for granted can actually be very difficult for a non-native speaker, particularly at the very casual or more formal/written ends of the scale. What you're experiencing is a natural bias - English feels easier because ('cause, 'cos, 'coz) even when you come across things like written out accents, or unfamiliar dialect, or archaic phrasing, you have an easier time of figuring it out.
That is the first explanation that might come to mind, but because it is specifically these certain small aspects that I find more complicated than English, I wonder whether it is the whole story. That is why I mentioned that Japanese grammar overall seems simpler to me than English. If it was just a general unfamiliarity bias then presumably everything would seem more complicated.
 
Yeah, what is to you clearly etc. etc.. You have to remember that I have only learnt from textbooks. None of those textbooks touched in any way on archaic or dialect speech. When I hit a new ending, contraction, etc., and it is not look-uppable in the dictionary, and not listed in the main reference places where I look for grammar explanations, then I have no idea at all what it is or what style of speech it is.

If you find my questions repetitious then please feel free not to read them.

That was the whole point of my reply to nekojita....that what may look one way to people with a particular background is going to look another way to somebody with a very different background and that it is important not to lose sight of that fact. I have been guilty of forgetting it myself, and that's bad.

In case I wasn't clear enough: I admire your efforts and your progress tremendously. When you finish this book I will beam with vicarious joy. I look forward to the day you tell us you just finished a book and don't really have any questions about it and didn't hit any snags worth the trouble of looking things up. I will be as proud of you as if I actually had something to do with it.

I wish even a tiny portion of the permanently functionally illiterate long-term gaijin community in Japan would make the efforts you do. I would say you put them to shame, but unfortunately they are a pretty shameless lot.

I don't mind admitting that I learn things from some of your questions. (Certainly you must have noticed that when I answer them I almost never answer all of them?) I'm certain I'm not the only one.
 
That was the whole point of my reply to nekojita....
Thank you for your conciliatory reply. I apologise if I seemed irritable in my replies to you and nekojita.

When you finish this book I will beam with vicarious joy.
In fact, I am near the end of the third volume in the HP series. This reading level suits me at the moment; it is challenging without being impossible. Also, while in future I want to progess to reading culturally Japanese books, it is a help for me at the moment that the subject matter is culturally familiar.
 
That's great that you're on the third book!

I really do wish that Japanese literacy among foreign residents of Japan would reach the point where literacy is as taken for granted as illiteracy is now. For all the complaints about unfairness, discrimination, exclusion, etc that they make there is NOTHING as limiting, crippling, or self-ghettoizing as to cut one's own self off by being illiterate.
 
I don't mean to knock your work ethic, which is impressive, and as Mike points out, not many people would be able to stick to this sort of project. I just often get the feeling that with a bit of a nudge you could easily be reading far more fluently than you are - like your level is actually higher than you think it is.

This is all rather 余計なお世話 on my side, I know, but seriously, you shouldn't worry about not having sufficient cultural familiarity or anything like that. The sort of stuff I read is mostly set in modern-day Japan and probably has less obscure vocab and grammar than in Harry Potter.

Sidenote: probably unclear from my original post, the yahoo question was also in Japanese, I didn't check for stuff in English.

As a peace offering: if you're willing to trust me with your address, since we're both in the UK, I'd be happy to send you some books. In terms of genres I mainly have romance, comedy, or mystery/suspense, mostly novels but some short story collections. PM me if you're interested. Otherwise, I'll go mind my own business.
 
Same offer goes for me, and I've made it before, I think. I'll gladly hit the Book-Off and send you some stuff any time you wish. That's a standing offer.
 
Thanks for the offers of books. At the moment I'm happy with what I've got, but sometime in the future, when I get to the end of this phase, assuming I continue with the endeavour, I may be soliciting book recommendations.
 
くださいまし / いいえ

eeky just want to second you on the fact that Japanese grammar is much more straightforward than English. It's not just you. The fact that pronouns changes depending on whether they are the subject or object is pretty crazy, in addition to importance of word order certainly makes a Japanese English learner choke.

Japanese make it up with kanji and a whole boat load of cultural restrictions that are impossible to know.

There are these classic/dialectal etc usages that do throw spanner on the works but you will eventually catch them all. Not that many of them. Treat them as idioms if you have to. Some of these expressions are leaks from Classic Japanese grammar.

As to your original question, this one is in the dictionary if you know where to look. Are you familiar with 六活用形? This is not taught properly in Japanese textbooks for foreigners. まし here is 命令形 of ます. The last one in brackets.

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