Fun in the san-san-san
On a lark I decided to switch my Facebook interface to use Japanese. I noticed today that on a particular day when I befriended several people
Russellさんが Aさん、 Bさんさん、 Cさん、 Dさん、 Eさんさんさんと他1人さんと友達になりました。
That’s “Russell-san became friends with A-san, B-san-san, C-san, D-san, E-san-san-san, and one other person-san.”
Aside from the strangeness (to me) of adding the honorific -san to the phrase 他1人 ‘one other person’, there is the extreme strangeness of the multiple -sans appended to some of the names. I looked at some other people’s front pages, and found the same pattern exhibited two other times, as well as a slightly different pattern: A-san, B-san, C-san-san, D-san, E-san-san, and F-san (no ‘others’ mentioned).
At first I thought it might be that some of the -sans got omitted for some names and then stacked up somewhere else, but in no case was someone’s name missing the honorific suffix.
Hello! I’m from a Latin American country, and while doing some research for a Grammar assingment for my English teacher’s training course, I ended up clicking on this blog… and I really couldn’t avoid reading this….
To tell you the truth (or, rather, what is true to me), being a japanese-blooded (does this word even exist?) girl, I can’t let you make such a mistake!
My Japanese knowledge is rather basic, but I can ensure you that normal people do not add “san” after “san” after somebody’s name. It’s as if someone like…let’s say I, came to you and told you “Did you know? People in England say “Good morning MrMrTompson” or “Excuse me, MsMsMs Donovan” … It’s just…not normal, is it? … Actually, it does sound funny, but there’s no way anybody would say that, right?
Anyway, it’s just for you to know… Hope I did not offend you. Oh! And sorry for not writing anything in japanese… I’m not really good at using computers, so I don’t know how to configurate it…hehehe…
It’s probably an artefact of the translation system, where a phrase can refer to sub-phrases, and it’s not the same person that translates the phrases. Also, there’s no preview. So probably the san was added inconsistently in several different templates.