Quote:
Originally Posted by Sashimister
In Japanese novels, the narrator often doesn't identify the speakers of the direct quotations. However, this only occurs when it is clear to the reader as to what character is speaking the line.
Not that I've paid much attention to this fact before, mostly because I am a Japanese-speaker to begin with, I can think of a couple of factors concerning the Japanese language that make these unidentified direct quotations possible.
1. Men and women speak totally different from each other.
2. Within either gender, people speak very differently according to their ages and varried social backgrounds.
3. Most importantly, each speaker has his/her own favorite sentence-ending particles, first-person pronoun, etc.
4. Characters speak in dialects. It isn't just "accents" as in some other languages. They actually use different words.
These factors pretty much tell the reader who is saying a particular line.
Thanks for the good question!
We are writing a story in the following thread and though we haven't done many pages yet, you can see this very phenomenon already. Unidentified quotations! 
http://www.japanforum.com/forum/%E6%...%EF%BC%9F.html |
Ah thanks, that clears up a lot. Yeah those factors would make sense why direct quotations wouldn't be necessary almost all of the time.
Quote:
Originally Posted by KyleGoetz
Most English novels do not identify the speaker often, either. It's considered quite poor literary writing.
Here's the first chapter of Tom Sawyer: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
You'll see that practically nothing has "X said, 'YYY'" or "'YYY,' said X." |
Indeed you right that in plenty of English novels , they tend to avoid identifying the speaker. Certainly from English novels I read in the past, it varies on how often the speaker is identified but they usually do it. Some novels almost never and others more often.
However in the Japanese novels I skimmed through, I could not see a single one hence my confusion. You know, being a beginner in Japanase and everything.
So I wanted to go on this forum to see if that is normal for Japanese or if I was seeing things wrongly(keep in mind I only skimmed through the books). Japanese is a much different language then I am accustomed to.