Victor Mair at the Log reports on an interesting Japanese compound verb that seems to be an adequate substitute for English profanity; he’s discussing this headline from “Japan’s hard-right, anti-China Sankei newspaper”:
「中国よ、消えうせやがれ」 フィリピン外相、“禁句”使って怒り爆発
“Chūgoku yo, kieuseyagare” Firipin gaishō “kinku” tsukatte ikari bakuhatsu
“Hey China, fuck off!” Philippines foreign minister uses taboo word in angry explosion
Mair writes:
The first three characters are the rough equivalent of “Hey China!” (“Chūgoku yo”). So far so good. It gets even better, though, because the delightfully nuanced verbal phrase “get the fuck out” gets translated as a compound of three verbs: “kie-use-yagare.”
The first two verbal stems are synonyms meaning “disappear,” though the contemporary uses of use(ru) tend toward the rude, i.e., “Get lost!” as command rather than simply get lost because you’re not in GPS range. Together, as the compound verb kieuseru, the implication is definitely and indelibly the former.
消える+ 失せる = 消え失せる
kieru + useru = kieuseru = “get lost,” “get outta here,” etc.
Semantically, then, the imperative kieusero would be enough to convey the meaning of “get out!” and perhaps even “get the fuck out.”
The addition of やがる (yagaru) is important, though. This is a verb that is only used as a suffix―often, as here, in the simple imperative. It is as rude as Japanese gets. It is perhaps best thought of as indicating mood or mode rather than meaning. And that mood ranges from disdain to hatred. It is the suffix you use to describe the actions of someone you actively despise. In other words, it is the emphatic, “the fuck” here.
I guess the takeaway is that because of its rich lexicon of verbs and verb forms for interpersonal relationships, this is one type of invective where Japanese can hold its own.
Jim Breen adds in a comment:
Interesting the see the compound verb 消え失せる being used very appropriately here. I’m quite fond of this 複合動詞 (fukugōdōshi) form; I even wrote a paper about them years ago: http://www.edrdg.org/~jwb/paperdir/jcv.pdf
When 消え失せる was first included in the JMdict/EDICT dictionary many years ago it had as one of its glosses “(in imperative) to fuck off”. Some years back that was removed as it was considered a bit strong. Perhaps we should revisit it.
See the end of the Log post for links to further discussions of Japanese swearing.
I’ve never seen this one.
消えろ kiero, yes. The imperative itself is brusque.
失せろ usero, yes.
やがる yagaru as an abusive verb ending, yes. (Here again in the brusque imperative.)
But not this magnificent 消え失せやがれ kieuseyagare.
It’s to be expected that a language with exquisite degrees of politeness and honorifics would have rough derogatory language to match it. And the very fact that the polite language is so well developed means that the derogatory terminology is highly effective, without necessarily resorting to shocking language like “fuck”, etc.
Yes, exactly, but it takes getting used to if you come from a profanity-rich language like English or (I bow my head in respect for the Ultimate) Russian.
I think that’s Nathan Hopson writing.
I don’t think that observation is unique to Nathan Hopson. Many people have noted the lack of strong profanities in Japanese, and the fact that “rough” verb forms take their place.
Frankly, I’m not totally impressed with Nathan Hopson, although he’s Mair’s go-to man for intuitions about Japanese. Nathan strikes me as a person who is still discovering the language. He often gets things wrong (or hasn’t encountered common usages) and his tone seems to be wonderment at things he should really know. Of course he is perhaps good for LanguageLog precisely because of this.
I bow my head in respect for the Ultimate) Russian.
Yes, Russians are very proud of themselves, but for rhythm and expressiveness, combining both blasphemy and sexual vulgarity, I would still give 10 points to Mexican Spanish.
Indeed, Russian insistence on the ugly sounding блядь instead of the more satisfying kurva should actually cost Russian points versus the other Slavic languages.
The late Reinhold Aman thought Hungarian held the crown for nasty swearing. What I have heard of Hungarians swearing casually and good-naturedly in English makes me think he was right.
i want to nominate québecois/acadien sacres for an honorable mention, because they manage to do so much with the fairly limited selection of ritual objects and other profanables available to catholics, and with so much reliance on simple sequences in “de”.
Indeed, Russian insistence on the ugly sounding блядь instead of the more satisfying kurva should actually cost Russian points versus the other Slavic languages.
I have the opposite reaction: блядь sounds like a real curse word, the other sounds like it should mean ‘curve’ and is no more satisfying to say emphatically.
A first glimpse at Hungarian.
Conversely, Polish people can’t drive in Spain.
Remember that all vowels are short in Polish under all circumstances. Result: kurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrwa with a quite satisfying trill.
A first glimpse at Hungarian.
That was classic!
Remember that all vowels are short in Polish under all circumstances. Result: kurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrwa with a quite satisfying trill.
I can see how it could be made emphatic and pleasing; I still think blyad′ is far more curse-wordy.
Conversely, Polish people can’t drive in Spain.
In Romanian, converting the /b/ in the Romanian noun curbă ‘curve’ to a /v/ results in a Slavic-derived noun meaning what you would expect it to mean given its cognates in Slavic languages. I imagine this has probably led to some unfortunate incidents involving non-native speakers of Romanian, although I have not personally heard of or witnessed any.
No time to review the deeper analysis of the Hungarian rézfaszú bagoly, but vigyen el is indefinite conjugation, so unless I’m overlooking something it seems like it’s actually “May the owl take me” (cursing self) or perhaps “May the owl take you” (cursing something).
Many thanks for this post. For some reason, I’ve found the explanation of kie-use-yagare immensely satisfying. Pure pleasure.
We aim to please!
Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish (1971) has an odd false etymology for kurveh: “Hebrew: karove: ‘a strange woman who comes very close.’” I have no idea where he got that from; possibly his tuchus, or someone else’s tuchus.
The spelling קורווע has a tsvei voven “וו” rather than a veis “ב” as in the Hebrew word (karov).)
(Although Yiddish does change the spelling (and pronunciation) of Hebrew-derived terms, so that alone is not definitive, e.g., “יונטיף”(yuntif) vs “יום-טוב”(yom tov), or “שאבעס” (shabbes) vs “שבת”(shabat/shabas))
The New Joys of Yiddish (2003) dropped the claimed Hebrew etymology bubbemeise.
Wiktionary Proto-Slavic kury says:
For whatever that’s worth.
I thought that was the Soviet spelling reform?
“Chick”, then.
Yiddish does change the spelling (and pronunciation) of Hebrew-derived terms
I thought that was the Soviet spelling reform?
on the pronunciation side, it’s more accurate to say that yiddish has a complex system for pronouncing the “same” lexeme in various registers from everyday conversation to leyning toyre in a synagogue context (dovid katz, of course, has the full breakdown). so, i believe, do at least some other jewish lects – but i have no idea whether ivrit is one of them, which is interesting*.
as i see it, though, the spelling side kinda depends on what counts as changes to the spelling. everybody records affixed morphemes from the other components of the language, joining them in writing as they would with any other stem. some standardization systems (like soviet “oktybrish”) aim for maximum transparency in relation to the spoken language, and so record hebrew words phonetically (closer i think to phonemically, but with any standardized system, that’s where the vowels are always gonna land you once there are speakers from different topolects involved). then there are the words whose meanings change significantly between hebrew and yiddish, which spelling systems have no reason to record at all. and i’m pretty sure that in YIVOish at least, and i assume other standardization systems that preserve etymological/historical spellings, there are also some loshn-koydesh-derived words that are spelled slightly differently from the hebrew or aramaic source, for no particularly visible reason. i feel like i’ve had one pointed out to me, but i can’t think of it (and i don’t have the hebrew to recognize one on my own).
.
* and that actually links around to the conversation(s) about the relationship between ivrit and various hebrews, in a way i haven’t considered before: how do ivrit speakers pronounce liturgical hebrew? is there a multi-layered system like the one yiddish has marking off various intermediate points between the liturgical hebrew and ivrit realizations of the same lexeme? does it entirely depend on a person’s familial lineage nusakh? if so, what about people from multiple lineages, each with a very distinct nusakh (and with no primary congregational context of use)? or is liturgical hebrew entirely assimilated to ivrit’s sound systems?
The few Israeli Hebrew-school teachers who I’ve heard pronounce liturgical or Biblical (which I heard much more of) Hebrew used the same Modern Israeli pronunciation they taught us for conversational Hebrew. I’d bet that’s not a general rule, but I hope people who know more will tell us. As you know, there are Sephardic liturgical pronunciations that differ a bit from Modern Israeli pronunciation, though it’s called Sephardic.
“vowels are short in Polish”
DM, expressively long consonants were a feature of male Russian mostly (I’m not sure about trills, what I have in mind is say, a long t), emphatically looong vowels being associated with 1. baby talk 2. speech of young women (those I hear on the street, but not my friends).
Can it be so that you mostly hear male adult Polish (rather than girly street Polish or baby talk)?
Despite what Vanya said about proud Russians, I prefer swearings in Afrikaans. “Put your head in a cow’s cunt and wait till the bull comes to fuck you”. Poetry (formally too, in Afrikaans).
You can’t just leave us in suspense like that. What’s the Afrikaans sentence?
1) I lied, of course. There is one long vowel in the language: when a catastrophe unfolds in front of your eyes, you have the choice between o Jezu and o, kurwaaaaa.
2) Mostly, yes, but not only. I have heard things like a 20-year-old calling her BFF Magdalena with outstretched arms and a singing voice: vocative Madziuniu! The last vowel wasn’t outright short maybe, but not as long as you’d expect in Spanish or as the above.
3) What I really had in mind is that some other languages without phonemic vowel length, Russian for example (and German dialects like mine), systematically lengthen stressed vowels. Polish doesn’t.