475
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
475 points (97.6% liked)
Asklemmy
43905 readers
1623 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
That's correct, you can insult someone accidentally while complimenting them in a similar way. The particles は (as in wa) and が (ga) have different connotations that can simply different things.
So saying メリーさんの顔はきれい (Mary-san no kao wa kirei, "Mary has a beautiful face") causes an implication that Mary has a beautiful face, (... But nothing else about her is beautiful). Changing the は for が makes the statement come across as intended.
Without going into detail on the whole wa vs ga thing, wa is more like "as for x..." which can imply a "but..." at the end, whether stated or not, which causes this effect.
Inverted "butterface"?
Thanks for the breakdown!