A: My wife died. B:I'm sorry って日本語でなんと言う?

[yooma]

How does this sort of conversation transpire in Japanese? I guess its not a real apology in any sense, but more of a verbal expression of sympathy. Although it could be an apology for bringing up the topic, but in my experience I don't see that sense as the most common usage. Rather, it seems just a reflexive expression of sympathy, or what have you. I know the Japanese are a superstitious bunch, so maybe they generally avoid speaking of the dead, but I'm sure there exists at least one appropriate phrase that corresponds to what we say in English.

[rei]

How does this sort of conversation transpire in Japanese? I guess its not a real apology in any sense, but more of a verbal expression of sympathy. Although it could be an apology for bringing up the topic, but in my experience I don't see that sense as the most common usage. Rather, it seems just a reflexive expression of sympathy, or what have you. I know the Japanese are a superstitious bunch, so maybe they generally avoid speaking of the dead, but I'm sure there exists at least one appropriate phrase that corresponds to what we say in English.

ご愁傷様でございます (ごしゅうしょうさまでございます）

お悔やみ申し上げます　（おくやみもうしあげます）

My condolences

[Genkii]

たいへんですね would be enough

Or a simple がんばってね！

[Chromedome]

それは残念だね。　でも、星の数ほど女姓はいるんだか らね。

[Effected After]

たいへんですね would be enough

Or a simple がんばってね！

No it wouldn't. Rei answered properly before you. Your post can be ignored.

[Since1990]

たいへんですね would be enough

Or a simple がんばってね！

No, never say that.

I tend to use "zannen" in my sentence rather than ご愁傷様 (gosyuusyou-sama).

[wernst]

たいへんですね would be enough

Or a simple がんばってね！

douchebag.

disrespectful answer regarding the subject.

[KansaiBen]

douchebag.

disrespectful answer regarding the subject.

also shows that he can't speak Japanese properly, though he thinks he can.


Maybe the husband doesn't want to 頑張って、he wants his dead wife back.

[KansaiBen]

それは残念だね。　でも、星の数ほど女姓はいるんだか らね。

Right, you can always find another woman. This is almost as bad but not quite.

Not something you say to a grieving husband.

[kurogane]

それは残念だね。　でも、星の数ほど女姓はいるんだか らね。

Hee Hee. The Spirit of Kuma Chan smiles upon you, my son.

I tend to use "zannen" in my sentence rather than ご愁傷様 (gosyuusyou-sama).

That is almost as flippant as Genkoid's idiotic response. Zannen is getting a parking ticket, or rain at a picnic.


Of course, I know you don't mean it in any such way.

Japanese is a ritual language: just follow the rules.

In which case, whatever Rei Rei wrote.



BTW, the insertion of idosyncracies into codified ritual exchanges is a sign of childishness, not individuality.

If you really were a fully developed individual, after all, you would respect the form, rather than F with it.

[Since1990]

Hee Hee. The Spirit of Kuma Chan smiles upon you, my son.





That is almost as flippant as Genkoid's idiotic response. Zannen is getting a parking ticket, or rain at a picnic.


Of course, I know you don't mean it in any such way.

Japanese is a ritual language: just follow the rules.

In which case, whatever Rei Rei wrote.



BTW, the insertion of idosyncracies into codified ritual exchanges is a sign of childishness, not individuality.

If you really were a fully developed individual, after all, you would respect the form, rather than F with it.

Yeah, I know what you mean. Suppose it depends on who you're saying it to. I've seen Japanese people use zannen (but not just by saying "zannen!!"), but you wouldn't won't to say that in a letter.

[Effected After]

I could see an obasan saying something along the lines of "本当に残念ですね", but it would probably come after they had already said the proper formalities.

[Agitator]

たいへんですね would be enough

Or a simple がんばってね！

There's a time to be a smart-@ss troll with a wisecrack, and there's a time to shut your trap and leave the thread to serious answers only. It's too bad you don't know the difference.

Unhappily,
A.

[Shimi]

Agree with what Rei said. You could add　このたびは　to ご愁傷様 or　心より to お悔やみ申し上げます as well. You could even combine them together as　このたびはご愁傷様でございます。心よりお悔やみ 申し上げます。

However, to me, ご愁傷様でございます and お悔やみ申し上げます seem very formal and are something you'd probably only say or hear at a funeral or wake. They seem very ceremonial and distant sounding so you probably should be careful regarding when and where you use them.

Something so formal might not work as well around the office or in a more casual situation with somebody you know. Maybe it that case, it would be OK to just to keep things more simple (natural) by saying something like 本当に残念ですね, or 大変でしたね and then offer some kind words of encouragement such as 元気を出してください, 体にお気を付けてください or even perhaps even　頑張ってください. I guess it all depends on how close you are to the other person and how formal the setting is. Maybe a good thing to do would be to ask a Japanese friend or coworker what they would say in different situations.

also shows that he can't speak Japanese properly, though he thinks he can.

Good one. Reminds me of this one from another thread.

僕がわざわざ起きらせて、大変迷惑しました。誠にすみ ませんでした。翌日早く起きないといかないとわかるの で、反省します。

Now that one was pretty funny.

[yooma]

Agree with what Rei said. You could add　このたびは　to ご愁傷様 or　心より to お悔やみ申し上げます as well. You could even combine them together as　このたびはご愁傷様でございます。心よりお悔やみ 申し上げます。

However, to me, ご愁傷様でございます and お悔やみ申し上げます seem very formal and are something you'd probably only say or hear at a funeral or wake. They seem very ceremonial and distant sounding so you probably should be careful regarding when and where you use them.

Something so formal might not work as well around the office or in a more casual situation with somebody you know. Maybe it that case, it would be OK to just to keep things more simple (natural) by saying something like 本当に残念ですね, or 大変でしたね and then offer some kind words of encouragement such as 元気を出してください, 体にお気を付けてください or even perhaps even　頑張ってください. I guess it all depends on how close you are to the other person and how formal the setting is. Maybe a good thing to do would be to ask a Japanese friend or coworker what they would say in different situations.

Thanks for this post. These context-sensitive phrases seem viable (well at least as far as I know 日本語). Some questions I want to pose:
The word "ごめん": Can it be used, for example, as ”ごめんね” in this situation?
To drop the formality of ご愁傷様でございます could one say "愁傷様で" or something similiar?
The word "やっぱり": If "元気を出してね" was admissable, would "やっぱ元気を出してね" also be permissable?

[rei]

Thanks for this post. These context-sensitive phrases seem viable (well at least as far as I know 日本語). Some questions I want to pose:
The word "ごめん": Can it be used, for example, as ”ごめんね” in this situation?
To drop the formality of ご愁傷様でございます could one say "愁傷様で" or something similiar?
The word "やっぱり": If "元気を出してね" was admissable, would "やっぱ元気を出してね" also be permissable?

ご愁傷様 would be okay.

I'd definitely steer clear of 元気に出して〜 Sounds a bit heartless, like 'Chin up, old boy'.

And ごめんdoesn't really translate well ('I'm sorry to hear...'?).It's more of a 'Pardon me'. Sounds like you were in some way 'Involved' in the passing away...

For less formal but still respectful you could go with お気の毒に.　　

[yooma]

And ごめんdoesn't really translate well ('I'm sorry to hear...'?).It's more of a 'Pardon me'. Sounds like you were in some way 'Involved' in the passing away...

lolz
I found this discussion on 気の毒
http://japanese.stackexchange.com/qu...how-is-it-used
Thanks for pointing that out. I think I will use this one, unless context otherwise affords a better alternative.

I'm still wondering, if "お気の毒に" is admissible, then is "やっぱりお気の毒に" also admissible? If you take the definition of やっぱり as:

An adverb indicating that an actual situation expectedly/anticipatively conforms to the speaker's notional standard based on past experience, comparisons with other people, and common sense.

Then the most immediate interpretation is that you are acknowledging the universal hardship your friend has now incurred from his loss, which is to be expected. So it sorta makes sense in this way; you're expressing empathy by acknowledging his situation/circumstances. But, to me, a sensible English counterpart might be "It sucks, doesn't it?" which could either be sympathetic or mocking depending on context. I'm not sure if ”やっぱり” can be similarly used to mock someone, but if so, I probably would just avoid using it.

[Hijinx]

I always love the pitfalls of the Japanese. Why would ご愁傷様でございます (ごしゅうしょうさまでございます) be so very close to ご馳走様でした?

[Genkii]

douchebag.

disrespectful answer regarding the subject.

ごめんくさい

The message you have entered is too short. Please lengthen your message to at least 10 characters.

[Smash]

In some regions they say not gosyûsyôsama, but gochisôsama, very well used expressions.


...edit, oh, hjinx already used that one, darn

[kurogane]

Thanks for this post. These context-sensitive phrases seem viable (well at least as far as I know 日本語). Some questions I want to pose:
The word "ごめん": Can it be used, for example, as ”ごめんね” in this situation?
To drop the formality of ご愁傷様でございます could one say "愁傷様で" or something similiar?
The word "やっぱり": If "元気を出してね" was admissable, would "やっぱ元気を出してね" also be permissable?

The use of any of those phases would quickly lose you a friend.

They are at best flippant, and probably heartlessly insouciant.


Here's the rule:

Don't screw with the form until you have mastered it.

That desire to individualise and personalise set expressions makes you look dickish and childish, not clever.

It's a ritual language.


Gomen, ne......

[yooma]

The use of any of those phases would quickly lose you a friend.

They are at best flippant, and probably heartlessly insouciant.


Here's the rule:

Don't screw with the form until you have mastered it.

That desire to individualise and personalise set expressions makes you look dickish and childish, not clever.

It's a ritual language.


Gomen, ne......

ritual language? lolz is this a joke?
I tried to ignore your posts, but this is so laughably stupid, and also you're trolling me now. A "ritual language" does not mean what you think it means (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ritual_language):

its believers often ascribe virtues to the language of worship that they would not give to their native tongues

The point is that it is distinct from any natural human language, it is synthetic and has only a very specialized purpose. By definition, Japanese (or any other natural language) is not, never was, and never will be anything even resembling something that would approximate something that someone might mistake as a sacred language. Even the Japanese would be offended with your attribution of it has a SL. I'm sure that by "ritual language" you were making a cultural proclamation as much as much a linguistic one. That being the case, congratulations Mr. Cultural Anthropologist. If you have any more trollish displays of sensitivity, just keep them to yourself.

You know, incidentally, this post was actually very useful to me. Your usage of "flippant", "insouciant", "individualize", and "personalize" seems unnatural given that I estimate your vocabulary size to be much too small to support a hypothesis that you have internalized these words to the extent that you employ them as naturally as the words in your mainstream lexicon. You inspired me to think of a way to test this. If I had a large corpus of your posts, I could mine them to build a model of your morphological, syntactic, and semantic knowledge. Then I would test the hypothesis (a=0.005) that your usage of these words is consistent with that model. An alternative hypothesis might be that you used a thesaurus or that you have only a very superficial acquisition of these words so that you are still a little clumsy with their usage. I would use the lexical network Wordnet (http://wordnet.princeton.edu/) as the semantic framework, so that I test how many individual lexical/network connections can be observed in your text. That would be model of your lexical-semantic knowledge. Then I would tally the frequency and class of every morphological operation you employ. That would be a model of your morphological knowledge. For a model of your syntactic knowledge, I would have to parse your text and measure the entropy of your rule observance and consistency. The entropy would be a measure of how disorganized your syntactical knowledge is, but I'm not sure about this one. Then with these models in place I would test whether or not your usage of those words is within the range (by plausible extrapolation) of your language knowledge. I'm not sure about all this, but you got me started.

If you care to give me about a 500,000 word corpus of your writings, I might use this parser http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/lex-parser.shtml to get all those statistics.

[kurogane]

Considering that you were the nutsucker trying to use "Oops!" and "Suck it up, son" to console a bereaved person, I think we know who the retard is here.

I bothered because you seemed like a serious enough student, but it turns out you're just a douchebag, not to mention an insensitive cumfart (to the bereaved, I mean.)

It's pretentious pedants like you that make it so much more enjoyable to slag than to help.

Give up studying Japanese. You don't have the wits, or the moxy, or even a clue.

Just stick to cutting and pasting all that gobbledeegoook.

BTW, using Wackypedia as a reference shows your sock colours.

In this case, I'd say a bright ignorant yellow.

[yooma]

Considering that you were the nutsucker trying to use "Oops!" and "Suck it up, son" to console a bereaved person, I think we know who the retard is here.

I bothered because you seemed like a serious enough student, but it turns out you're just a douchebag, not to mention an insensitive cumfart (to the bereaved, I mean.)

It's pretentious pedants like you that make it so much more enjoyable to slag than to help.

Give up studying Japanese. You don't have the wits, or the moxy, or even a clue.

Just stick to cutting and pasting all that gobbledeegoook.

BTW, using Wackypedia as a reference shows your sock colours.

In this case, I'd say a bright ignorant yellow.

lolz I'm starting to like you now.

[yooma]

Considering that you were the nutsucker trying to use "Oops!" and "Suck it up, son" to console a bereaved person, I think we know who the retard is here.

I bothered because you seemed like a serious enough student, but it turns out you're just a douchebag, not to mention an insensitive cumfart (to the bereaved, I mean.)

It's pretentious pedants like you that make it so much more enjoyable to slag than to help.

Give up studying Japanese. You don't have the wits, or the moxy, or even a clue.

Just stick to cutting and pasting all that gobbledeegoook.

BTW, using Wackypedia as a reference shows your sock colours.

In this case, I'd say a bright ignorant yellow.

Fine, I won't dismiss or tease you Kurogane. But only if you explain why Japanese is a "ritual language". Not a "ritual culture" which is not your assertion. As you say it you are categorizing Japanese as a ritual language, which means first you have to enumerate those properties of a language that qualify it as "ritual" (define ritual language) and then demonstrate how Japanese possesses these attributes.

[kurogane]

Drunk again, are ya?????

For a linguist, you don't seem to be a very cunning linguist.

Then again, anybody who would even imagine that a common form of apology is interchangeable with an expression of condolence is either trapped in their own language (i.e. ethnocentric, in the descriptive sense), or just too stupid to care.

Or.................drunk again.

Anyways, yer FOS, and your Japanese sucks assjoos.

I'm FOS too, but my Japanese is stupefyingly good.


I'm right, you're wrong.

So there.

NYA NYA NYA

[yooma]

Drunk again, are ya?????

For a linguist, you don't seem to be a very cunning linguist.

Then again, anybody who would even imagine that a common form of apology is interchangeable with an expression of condolence is either trapped in their own language, or just too stupid to care.

Or.................drunk again.

Anyways, yer FOS, and your Japanese sucks assjoos.

I'm FOS too, but my Japanese is stupefyingly good.


At any rate, I'm right, you're wrong.

So there.

NYA NYA NYA

lolz come one kurogone, now is your chance to shine. don't disappoint! just explain why Japanese is a ritual language. thats all you have to do.

[yooma]

Drunk again, are ya?????

For a linguist, you don't seem to be a very cunning linguist.

Then again, anybody who would even imagine that a common form of apology is interchangeable with an expression of condolence is either trapped in their own language (i.e. ethnocentric, in the descriptive sense), or just too stupid to care.

Or.................drunk again.

Anyways, yer FOS, and your Japanese sucks assjoos.

I'm FOS too, but my Japanese is stupefyingly good.


I'm right, you're wrong.

So there.

NYA NYA NYA

I'm just browsing some of your posts:
cvntfart
blithe subliteracy
numbnutted retard
dumber than a load of bricks
a sneaky feeling
those middle agers
tinfoil hat conspiracy
BA DUM BUM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
complete and loveable idiot
After careful perusal
I knew Jackie was a bigot, but I never figgered him for a racist.
something to Yuck! about
Fit and fun as many of them seem
once you are in & out
they tend to get all mothery and solicitous
prime ethical directive
egregious and recidivist offender
a piece of video
I can dig that
Too Rapey Rapey for you
sort of a rennaissance of sorts
suck poopoo juice
sanctimonious rubbish
to start from the middle, house prices fell in 2008, recovered rapidly,

I can tell that you have a preference for idioms. In fact, I bet most of your lexical acquisition has been done through reanalyzing idioms and collocations. But wow, do you have some conspicuous language habits.

[kurogane]

ごめ、ね．

元気出して、ね．

[ThaHamburgler]

Fine, I won't dismiss or tease you Kurogane. But only if you explain why Japanese is a "ritual language". Not a "ritual culture" which is not your assertion. As you say it you are categorizing Japanese as a ritual language, which means first you have to enumerate those properties of a language that qualify it as "ritual" (define ritual language) and then demonstrate how Japanese possesses these attributes.

Ritualized or ritualistic language, as in there are set phrases for certain situations. Sure we could bend the rules with these things, but it's best to know the rules first before trying so...

lol, linguistic analysis of japanese isn't needed, just learn the damn language. Its not dead or dying, you aren't gonna make discoveries an 8 year old living in country couldn't make

[yooma]

lol, linguistic analysis of japanese isn't needed

but that's exactly my research topic. i think I've just been in school mode for too long, you start rejecting ideas in your daily life unless they meet the same level of rigour in your work. even if a little kid would come up to you and say "i like ice cream. pink ice cream tastes better then purple!" you would think to yourself "oh yeah you little ʃit, i hope you have the statistical evidence to back up that assertion. and im gunna look at your experimental design to ensure that it is sufficiently randomized." and so forth lolz.