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Bonus 44: The Most Esteemed Honorifics Episode (Patreon)

Published:
2020-10-01 23:27:37
Imported:
2023-02
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Most Esteemed and Venerable Audience! Lend us your ears! Attend to your most humble podcast hosts! We crave your indulgence for our discussion of honorifics! 

In this episode, your hosts Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about honorifics. We talk about how various languages encode social hierarchies in grammar, vocabulary, and the ways we address people. We also talk about some counterpoints to honorifics, such as despectives or humilifics (like "your obedient servant") and honorific reversal, when you use an ostensible honorific for non-honouring purposes (like calling a kid that's in trouble "little miss"). Which, of course, takes us into a small detour into how "thou" has switched in English and the faux-archaic musical genre of bardcore. 

Announcements:

Crash Course Linguistics videos are now coming out weekly! Keep an eye out for them at 2pm North American Eastern Time on Fridays for the rest of 2020. If you want some further reading and practice exercises, you can also check out the companion issues of Mutual Intelligibility. We also have a Crash Course channel in the Lingthusiasm Discord if you want to chat about them with fellow lingthusiasts, and stay tuned for an upcoming bonus episode which goes behind the scenes on the writing/curriculum design process with us and Jessi Grieser. 

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

You can listen to this episode on this page, via the Patreon RSS or download the mp3. A transcript of this episode is available as a Google Doc. Lingthusiasm is also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com or chat to us on the Patreon page. Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at AllThingsLinguistic. Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo. 

To chat about this episode and other lingthusiastic topics with your fellow linguistics fans, join us on the Lingthusiasm Discord server. 

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles

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Comments

Anonymous

Oh my god yes, so much bard core on my Youtube feed now 🤩

Anonymous

I know this episode is a little old, but I wanted to add a Japanese honorifics example since you asked for them! My husband was a Mormon missionary in Japan for 2 years, and as a representative of the church, he was considered to have a fairly high social status and so was able to talk to most people (even older people or authority figures) as an equal or as if he was their superior. When he returned to the US, he went back to college and majored in Japanese, and his teachers expected him to address them as if he was of the lowest status and they were the highest status (teachers are highly respected in Japan and students are expected to be very humble). He was constantly forgetting and speaking to his teachers as if he was their equal because that was what he was used to, and they did NOT like that. Even though he was completely fluent in Japanese, he got lower grades in some of his classes because teachers saw him as inappropriately informal or even rude.

Anonymous

Talking of how reminds me of how when I was in school, at one point I decided i'd try to ironically bring back some ye olde ways of saying things, and so when I met my friends at lunch, I'd say "Good morrow my good friend!" and "Godspeed you young brute!". It's strange how "good friend" in that vocative use was ironic and could almost be biting, but since I said it around my actual Good Friends, the use of the irony turned into an in joke, until it once again became a somewhat endearing honorific pet-namey sort of thing (particularly with long-term semantic satiation). It's even funnier, that, even tho "young brute" is technically a insult, because it just seemed appropriately ye olde (I dunno if I just had cryptomensia to some literary reference, or if it just seemed ye olde cus it's an oldish word), and so this itself also became an endearing honorific pet-name of sorts due to the ironic in-jokeness of it all. Your "thou" anecdote also reminds me of my childhood church, which was this big old stone brick anglican church, and at the back on one of the walls it said "Dost thou believeth on the Lord?". Leaving aside the interesting prepositional difference with on, I find it quite funny that whilst this would have been relatively informal speech back then, these days it comes across is almost strict and imposing.