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It is a characteristic of Japanese that from such brief expressions as the above, one is able to guess that the speakers are a man and a woman, what their approximate ages are, and even what the relationship between the two is.*
Years ago when there were still many American soldiers stationed in Japan, we used to see an American, driving a jeep with a Japanese woman by his side. On seeing a Japanese car suddenly appear from a side street, the driver would say, Dame n, butsukaru wa yo! (That’s no good—you’ll bump into me!).† We could guess with what kind of Japanese he was associating and from what kind of person he was learning Japanese; it was all very hilarious. But the American surely thought he was using proper Japanese. It would have been hard, indeed, to explain to him why it was funny.
According to Jespersen, it sounds womanish to use “so” when one means “very much,” and “common” when one means “vulgar.”8 But it seems that there are very few differences in the expressions used by men and women in European languages in general.
In contrast, the languages of the American Indians are notable for the differences between the speech of men and women. It is said that among the Caribs of the Lesser Antilles in the eastern end of the Caribbean Sea, only the men speak Carib, while the women speak the same language as the Arawaks on the continent. It is as if the men spoke Japanese and the women Korean. There is a legend that the islands were formerly inhabited exclusively by an Arawak tribe and that the Caribs invaded them and killed all the men, sparing the women. This, they say, was the source of the anomaly.9 The Arawak language must sound unspeakably bewitching to the men; if the boys by mistake should use Arawak, they would surely be jeered at and feel embarrassed.
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