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The Japanese language makes use of a system of honorific speech, called keishō (敬称), which includes honorific suffixes and prefixes when talking to, or referring to others in a conversation. Suffixes are often gender-specific at the end of names, while prefixes are attached to the beginning of many nouns.
There is also one common exception for the go-prefix, ごゆっくり go-yukkuri "slowly", where the main word is clearly not of Chinese origin. These prefixes are used for two purposes: to speak respectfully about a stranger or social superior's family, belongings, or actions (as part of 尊敬語, sonkeigo); or to speak in a generally refined ...
Gairaigo are Japanese words originating from, or based on, foreign-language, generally Western, terms.These include wasei-eigo (Japanese pseudo-anglicisms).Many of these loanwords derive from Portuguese, due to Portugal's early role in Japanese-Western interaction; Dutch, due to the Netherlands' relationship with Japan amidst the isolationist policy of sakoku during the Edo period; and from ...
Most nouns in the Japanese language may be made polite by the addition of o-or go-as a prefix. o-is generally used for words of native Japanese origin, whereas go-is affixed to words of Chinese derivation. In some cases, the prefix has become a fixed part of the word, and is included even in regular speech, such as gohan 'cooked rice; meal ...
Uni, a colloquial term for university; Uni (food), sea urchin in Japanese cuisine; Uni (letter), a glyph in Georgian scripts; Uni (mythology), the supreme goddess of Etruscan mythology; Uni (inhabited locality), name of several places in Russia; Uni language (ISO 639-3 language code: uni), a language of Papua New Guinea
Adding a prefix to the beginning of an English word changes it to a different word. For example, when the prefix un-is added to the word happy, it creates the word unhappy. The word prefix is itself made up of the stem fix (meaning "attach", in this case), and the prefix pre-(meaning "before"), both of which are derived from Latin roots.
Japanese does not have equivalents of prepositions like "on" or "about", and often uses particles along with verbs and nouns to modify another word where English might use prepositions. For example, ue is a noun meaning "top/up"; and ni tsuite is a fixed verbal expression meaning "concerning":
There are a few Japanese words that, although they appear to have originated in borrowings from Chinese, have such a long history in the Japanese language that they are regarded as native and are thus treated as kun'yomi, e.g., 馬 uma "horse" and 梅 ume. These words are not regarded as belonging to the Sino-Japanese vocabulary.