When ‘you’ is askew: Analyzing the ambiguities of ‘anata’

A site that gives suggestions to Japanese students defines “anata” as “the most dangerous word in Japanese.” Another has a blog post entitled, “Don’t you dare call me anata!!!” Further along, the very same article decries the word as “useless.” Surely this is language-instruction hype, intending to set off passion in an ordinary problem? Maybe not. As proper a scholastic, linguist Yoko Yonezawa is a little bit much less remarkable yet nonetheless silently extreme in encountering this fiddly second-person pronoun, labeling her publication “The Mysterious Address Term anata ‘you’ in Japanese.”

Anata is the lexical comparable of Schrodinger’s feline, all at once courteous and also disrespectful, far-off and also intimate. Or maybe it is a shape-shifting superhero, an idea that struck me when I ended up analysis Yonezawa’s publication with a.