Polite like an Egyptian? Case Studies of Politeness in the Late Ramesside Letters

Gómez

2020

Journal of Pragmatics

Self Cite

The concept of "Discernment politeness" stems from research undertaken in the 1980s on the Japanese phenomenon of wakimae. Since the earliest work on the phenomenon by Hill et al. (1986) and Ide (1989Ide ( , 1992, many scholars have looked to further explore Discernment across cultures (i.e. Kádár and Mills 2013;Kádár and Paternoster 2015;Ridealgh and Jucker 2019). Fundamentally, Discernment has been approached as expected (and quasi-mandatory) behavioural norms used by subordinates towards their superiors within a communicative act, dictated by the socio-cultural context of the interaction (Ridealgh and Jucker 2019). What becomes apparent, when studying ancient languages, is that due to the hierarchical nature of remote societies, Discernment includes a complementary dimension, an opposing phenomenon to deference, equally visible in interpersonal interactions, which has its foundation within the Power variable. This paper explores this opposing phenomenon (i.e. expected or permitted language used by superiors to their subordinates as a manifestation of their Power), which we call "Potestas", within the context of Late Egyptian and Old Latin, in order to highlight the phenomenon, its forms of expression in these two languages, the gaps in regards to the Power variable within traditional politeness approaches, and its relationship with (Im)politeness Research.

Section: Discernment and Powermentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: +Power -Powermentioning

confidence: 99%

Potestas and the language of power: Conceptualising an approach to Power and Discernment politeness in ancient languages

Gómez

2020

Journal of Pragmatics

Self Cite

“…The Late Ramesside Letters visibly, linguistically, and structurally demonstrate the importance of maintaining social power and position within the community under review (Ridealgh 2016). The letters follow strict patterns in communication, both in terms of grammatical forms utilised (Sweeney 2001: 53), use of directives and information acts, and length of the formal introductions (Ridealgh 2013a), which change according to the relationship the sender of the letter has with the recipient.…”

Section: Remote Culturesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, this word only appears a limited number of times, and only in didactic texts; it does not appear in other contexts. The didactic genre is designed to express an idealised version of society, one that is resolutely based on correctly understanding related social dynamics and expected behaviour when communicating with superiors, subordinates or social equals (Ridealgh 2016). The Instructions of Ptahhotep highlights this well, revealing verbal and non-verbal expected behaviour:…”

Section: Late Egyptianmentioning

confidence: 99%

Late Egyptian, Old English and the re-evaluation of Discernment politeness in remote cultures

Jucker

2019

Journal of Pragmatics

Self Cite

The term "Discernment" was originally coined back in the 1980s, where it was first used as an approximate translation of the Japanese term wakimae but later used independently in other contexts and cultures. In this paper, we re-assess its value as an analytical tool for two remote cultures and languages with a severely fragmented and limited textual heritage; Late Egyptian and Old English. In spite of their obvious differences, they have in common that their societies were strictly hierarchically ordered. Power was a fixed factor and not negotiable, and thus social movement was generally not possible. Our argumentation is based on a careful study of the Late Ramesside Letters, a corpus of personal communication written in Late Egyptian (c. 1099-1069BCE), and on a range of differe nt constructions (directives, terms of address) in Old English. In these contexts, the concept of Discernment turns out to be a very useful analytical tool to describe the relations hip dynamics in strictly hierarchical societies. It describes (linguistic) behaviour which is socially and situationally adequate and quasi mandatory, and which closely indexes the social relationship between speaker and addressee, as well as the social and linguis tic context within which the exchange takes place.

“…The lexeme jX in this case is directly translated as 'please'. Two things are important to note here: 1) semantically, jX is an interjection, it is not a polite discourse marker; 2) contextually, the letter is sent by a superior to a subordinate and no polite linguistic forms were needed within this relationship dynamic; hence this directive does not need a 'please' as we understand the word today, especially within a British English contexts (see Ridealgh 2016a). Yet, the translation by Wente has been popularised and many students and scholars alike do not visit the original source text to check the quality of translation.…”

Section: The Value Of Multimodality and Historicitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction

Kádár

2019

JHP

Self Cite

Why do historical (im)politeness research?Historical (im)politeness research was formally 'established' as a field in 2010 when Kádár and Culpeper published a collection of studies with the title Historical (Im)Politeness. In the introduction of this collection, they argue that while topics related to historical (im)politeness have been present in pragmatics since its formation, it is a timely step to focus historical (im)politeness research as an independent area of inquiry. 1 Yet, in spite of this spearheading attempt (and subsequent ones like Bax and Kádár 2011) to elevate historical (im)politeness research to a place it deserves, so far the field has remained relatively low-key in the booming field of politeness studies: if one looks into the number of publications on historical (im)politeness, 2 it may rightly appear as far less popular than synchronic politeness studies. The emphasis here is on the word 'far less': while history by its very nature may not be as popular as modernity when it comes to the analysis of a theme like (im)politeness, it has significance to the study of a variety of synchronic themes. This raises a question that we intend to investigate in this paper: are there ways through which we could increase the visibility of historical (im)politeness research?Researchers involved in historical (im)politeness generally agree that historical data can rightly be studied for its own sake (see Section 3.1 in Kádár 2017). A wide variety of areas in the field represent this autotelic approach, spanning research on terms of address (e.g. Taavitsainen and Jucker 2001), through explorations of historical ideologies on interpersonal politeness (e.g. Klein 1994), to the study of insults in Old English (e.g. Pakis 2011). While this historical focus is arguably the most representative line of research in the field, it is relevant primarily to those who work either on historical pragmatics or related fields, such as sociohistorical linguistics (e.g. Nevelainen 2003) or historical sociolinguistics (e.g. Bergs 2005). A number of scholars working on both synchronic and diachronic politeness (e.g. Kádár and Culpeper 2010;Jucker 2011;Bax and Kádár 2011;Kádár and Haugh 2013) have pointed out that historical (im)politeness may as well have a key applicability beyond this scope: it can both operate as a testing ground for modern (im)politeness frameworks and bring innovative analytic concepts into synchronic research (see Section 2). As Bax and Kádár argue, perhaps no politeness theory can be complete without 'the establishment of diachronic trends in (im)politeness, including cross-cultural historical developments in (im)polite language behaviour and its evolutionary antecedents'.