# 私 vs. 自分



## hmoulding

I'm reading Natsume Souseki's The First Night. I noticed that he uses 自分は a lot where I would expect him to use 私は. What's the difference?
-- 
ヘルゲ


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## Wishfull

Hi.
In Japan, there are not a few pronouns which represent the *first person*.
私は＝most standard polite expression
わしは＝impolite expression, spoken by men.
俺は＝impolite expression, spoken by men.
自分は＝spoken by men. This expression has 謙譲表現.
Do you know kenjyo-go? It's one of 敬語.
In army, when a lower order soldier speaks to a higher rank officer, he useｓ 自分は.
In today's Japan, when I hear a man expressing himself as "自分”, I think he has some philosophy or ideology.
He must be a very polite person, or a very special person.
Right field? Coming from military? Mafia?
Influenced by some literature?

Basically, which pronoun to choose to express himself depends on each individual preference.


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## lrosa

Wishfull said:


> 俺は＝impolite expression



It's not impolite when speaking with close friends/family, though, right? I'm under the impression, from the few Japanese TV shows I've watched, that most men refer to themselves as 俺...


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## hmoulding

Thanks to Wishfull for the explanation.

To Irosa, I think the English referents "polite" and "impolite" are simplistic. They are useful shorthand, but don't reflect all of the ambiguities and subtleties inherent in their use by native speakers of Japanese.

As a native speaker of German, I think there are some parallels between the Japanese keigo and German formal address, at least in how German cultural constructs inform how the grammar is used. 

I think there are similar things in other languages, like Spanish (ustedes). 

English is wonderfully simple in that regard. We make up for it in other ways. ^_^
-- 
ヘルゲ


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## lrosa

Oh, maybe it has more to do with "formal/informal" than "polite/impolite"?


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## hmoulding

If I understand Wishfull's explanation correctly, jibun isn't really formal or informal or polite or impolite. In this usage it's part of kenjougo (謙譲語) or humble speech, and it may make the speaker sound self deprecating. As this is someone telling kind of a ghost story, think of the tone that Edgar Allen Poe sets in "The Telltale Heart" by using formal English without making the speaker sound pompous. 

Another story in the same collection (The Third Night) uses the word omae (御前), which according to my Kenkyusha dictionary is rude but the conversation is described as one between equals. For reasons like this I like to avoid describing any of these pronouns as polite or impolite or formal or informal. There's a lot more going on than an English speaker (nor yet a German speaker) can appreciate with a mere two years of learning or a glance into a dictionary. ^_^


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## lrosa

Sorry, I was actually referring to the difference between 私 and 俺


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## hmoulding

You might check out this thread for some comments on boku:

http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=1371893
-- 
ヘルゲ


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## lrosa

Thanks for the link and sorry for hijacking your thread


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## Flaminius

hmoulding said:


> I'm reading Natsume Souseki's The First Night. I noticed that he uses 自分は a lot where I would expect him to use 私は. What's the difference?


Sōseki's work is 101 years old.  The difference as we perceive it does not apply.  Japanese has undergone humongous changes since then.  For instance, I don't think 自分 was associated with military background or belligerent ideology back in Sōseki's time.  One would have to compare 自分 and 私 as used by Sōseki or a lot of Mēji authors to appreciate the difference that the comtemporaries could feel.  I can neither refer to a work nor do the research myself.  

The Mēji Japanese attempted to tweak Japanese so it can express Western concepts that they were fascinated with.  Technology, administration, economy and military are obvious fields of innovation but more subtle cultural concepts needed new words too; love romance, rights, freedom, society, individuals and so on.  They not only made new words but also created new constructions to modernise Japanese.  Personal demonstratives were experimented upon in search of deictic expressions independent of the social status of the referent or the speaker (on a par with grammatical persons in European languages).  That way, they thought, they could depict new human relationships where people meet each other not as representatives of one's social standing but as individuals with their own wits and hearts.

Person deixis in Japanese changed a bit but it is never in one-to-one relationship with the grammatical person (which is due to the lack of agreement in Japanese; a pure and simple grammatical feature).  "Neutral" demonstratives fell out of use or characterised users by becoming a trait of a social group.  自分 is one of the words that followed this path.


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## hmoulding

Cool! Thanks, Flaminius, that's very helpful information!
-- 
へるげ


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