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御 is or ?: お~, ご~, 御~ Honorific Prefix
御 is or ?: お~, ご~, 御~ Honorific Prefix
One of the first things you notice when learning Japanese are the honorific suffixes,
like san, chan and kun, but there's another type of honorific too: the honorific prefix o お
or go ご. The kanji for both these words would be 御, but it's usually not written
with kanji
御 is O or Go?
The honorific prefix can be either o お or go ご, and it's normally written with hiragana. It
may be written with kanji, as 御, but that rarely happens.
For example, oniisan お兄さん, "brother," has the honorific prefix, but it's rarely
written oniisan 御兄さん, with the 御 kanji. Likewise, the expression gokurou ご苦労,
"thanks for your work," is usually written like that, not as gokurou 御苦労. They can be
written with the kanji, but that doesn't happen as frequently.
So both o and go prefixes are the same thing, even though one is o and the other one
is go. It's the same 御 honorific prefix.
Also, in some rare cases it's read other ways, too, like on おん or gyo ぎょ.
Function
The nature of the o, go honorific prefix and its function kind of varies, from meaningless
to meaningful. It's important to know this because the honorific prefix can be added to
basically any word in the Japanese language for great effect, but it commonly has little
effect or no effect at all.
That's to say: in some cases, the honorific matters. But in other cases it doesn't matter.
And being able to tell when it matters and when it doesn't matter is kind of important.
Honorific Language
The primary use of the honorific prefix is in, of course, "honorific language," keigo 敬語.
Kazoku Example
To understand it better, a common example: the word kazoku 家族, which means
"family."
If you're talking about somebody's family and you want to show a minimum of respect,
you'd better say gokazoku ご家族 instead, which would mean "[your] honorable family"
or "[his] honorable family" or "somebody's honorable family."
So every time you want to talk about somebody's family in honorific speech, you add in
the go for some honorable spice.
Note that it's possible to use the word kazoku in honorific speech, only so long as you
aren't talking about anybody's family. That's pretty unlikely to happen since you'd expect
to be talking about somebody's family if you're talking about a family at all. Only,
maybe, if you're talking about families in general, or what is "a family," then the
word kazoku alone would be alright, otherwise it's gokazoku.
An exception is when you're talking about your own family. In Japanese, it's generally
considered pompous, not to say cocky, stupid, snobby, arrogant, imbecile, disgusting,
repugnant, and other bad words, to use honorifics toward yourself. You use honorifics
toward other people, not toward yourself. So your family is just a kazoku, but other
families are gokazoku.
Okay, fine, you can't add the honorific prefix to all of the words. For example, you don't
add it to katakana words, such as "coffee," coohii コーヒー, but you can add it to most
words.
Japanese respectful language likes to avoid using words directly with people of higher
status. So you don't "meet him," that's preposterous! More like, "a meeting with him
happened," and you were involved.
Sonkeigo vs. Kenjougo
The above was sonkeigo 尊敬語, which you use when you want to make somebody
appear of higher status. There's also the counterpart, kenjougo 謙譲語, which you use
when you want to make yourself appear of lower status.
It's the difference between saying "you rock" and "compare to you, I suck." Or, also,
"your drawing looks good," or "damn, I wish I could draw as well as you." Ultimately the
effect is the same but the essence is different.
Kenjougo Verb
Perhaps the most common case of this is the verb negau 願う, "to request," "to ask," "to
beg," which becomes o-negai-shimasu お願いします.
What happens here is kenjougo: when you use a verb that has some sort of contact
with someone you should use honorific language with, you gotta say o-verb-shimasu,
remember? So go-houkoku-shimasu ご報告します in this case, since your report ends
up going into their ears or eyes or something.
An extreme case of this would be the phrase:
go-shitsumon-sasete-itadaki-masu ご質問させていただきます.
Lemme ask u sum stuff.
The reason this phrase is confusing, is because shitsumon 質問 means "question." So,
normally, you'd expect that goshitsumon ご質問 means "your question", because I can't
use the honorific toward my own stuff, so it must be somebody else's question.
Set-Phrases
Besides that, there are even certain set phrases that are like alternative ways of saying
something, but in keigo.
Another one is goran ni naru ご覧になる, which means "to see," just like miru 見る.
Well, it's possible to have not a single noun, but multiple nouns with the honorific prefix
in a single phrase. And the more there are the sillier it looks. Imagine someone saying
"thy majesty, thy noble words and honorable actions have caused thy powerful guard
great worry for thy delicate safety." It's just full of qualifiers everywhere.
No, don't. Have common sense.
So, do people just spam the F key the honorific prefix to pay respects? No. It's used
more moderately. You don't honorific everything just because you can. Sure, there are
occasions, more official occasions, where a more honorific language is expected, but
normally this doesn't happen.
There are words that you always honorific, there are words you might honorific, and
words you'd think nobody cares if you don't honorific so you just don't. It really depends.
In Anime Life
Of course, when this happens the speech is only one of the factors. It's pretty obvious
from how they get enraged about everyone who doesn't show the utmost respect in The
Great One's presence, or how they follow every order like their word is absolute, etc.
Pretty Speech
In some cases the honorific prefix may be used to make the word prettier, softer, and
perhaps cuter, in a sense, than it really is. This is called bikago 美化語, literally
"beautification-language."
This happens for example in words related to food. Like niku 肉, "meat," and yasai 野菜,
"vegetables." Since they aren't really anybody's meat or vegetables, they're just, well,
meat and vegetables, you don't really need to lower or raise anybody's status here, but
words like oniku お肉 and oyasai お野菜 exist... why?
It's the same principle that led people to somehow make "his mistress" mean what it
means. It isn't for the lack of a better word, it's for the lack of a finer word. Sometimes
people feel saying niku without the honorific sounds bad, rough, something a ruffian-
pirate would say, so they put the honorific in there and it gets instantly classier: oniku.
For example: gohan 御飯. This means, of course, "FOOD!!!1" And it's always like
that, gohan. You don't see anybody eating han's, they eat gohan only.
They're gohanivores.
And this is kind of weird because it has the honorific, but there's nothing honorific about
it. And you can't make it honorific by adding the honorific prefix because... it already has
the honorific prefix. So you can't say, for example, gogohan 御御飯, that doesn't exist.
But you can't say just han 飯 either, because nobody would know what that's supposed
to mean.
Honorable People
Words regarding family members, like okaasan お母さん, "mother," otousan お父さん,
"father" oniisan お兄さん, "brother," etc. usually have the honorific prefix. In some cases
they don't, but they usually do.
Gestures
Words related to manners, like orei お礼, "thanks," ojigi お辞儀, "bowing," gomen ご免,
"sorry," pretty much always have the honorific prefix.
Historic Stuff
In some cases the situation is a bit complex. For example, taku 宅 means "house,"
so otaku お宅 means "your house" or "somebody's house," etc. But then that word
became a slang: otaku オタク which refers to somebody very deep into their hobby. And
then this otaku slang is always otaku, never just taku as it once were.
(There's also a theory that something similar happened with oppai おっぱい, claiming it
came from onaka-ippai お腹一杯, "to fill one's stomach," because, you know, milk does
come from those things. But it's an old word and nobody is quite sure where it really
came from.)
Another case is omae 御前, meaning "you" in Japanese. It used to be that the term was
supposed to refer to the "front," mae 前, of someone of high status, because referring to
such person directly was disrespectful. Like how we say "stand before you" in English,
we stand in your front. But that was centuries ago, nowadays it's just stuck and nobody
really remembers or cares how it was used.
Note that you can attach the prefix to pretty much every word, but some words more
frequently have the prefix attached to them, in particular, some of the following come
words tagged as common in the JMDict Japanese-dictionary project.
No Okurigana
Exceptions
Other Readings
Examples of other readings for the honorific prefix:
onsha 御社
Your company.
gyoen 御苑
Imperial garden.
Note that sometimes the kanji isn't a honorific prefix. For example, the word seigyo 制
御, meaning "control," has the gyo at the end of the word instead.