Then, in the Showa era, young, delinquent girls started using it. In the olden days, the ladies of the red-light districts used this as their personal pronoun. Atai ( あたい) takes after atashi, simplifying the sounds even further.
Next up is a further evolution of the sound of watashi. This one carries a bit of a childish feel to it (since the difficult for children to pronounce “w” is missing) and is only really used by women in a casual, and perhaps cutesy, way. This one degenerates the sounds even further, removing the “w” sound as well. Nowadays, watakushi is only used in very formal situations. Over time the sounds condensed down and removed the “ku” sound. The most well-known alternative pronunciation is watakushi ( わたくし). But, where appropriate, you might read it in your head as one of the following alternative pronunciations. Most of the time you’d just read it as watashi. The easiest possibility is that the text will include furigana, which is the phonetic “spelling” in kana just above or beside the kanji.Īnother possibility is that you’d simply know from context. So, you might be wondering how the heck you’re supposed to know the pronunciation when reading a book. Heads up before we dive in: all of these use that same kanji, 私. Watashi has some variants within itself as well, owing somewhat to the natural changes in how people pronounce things, but also pointing back into the history of the word as well. I wouldn’t worry too much about this as I feel pretty confident it will always be clear from context which type of “watashi” is being used.
私のもの (watashi-no-mono) turns it into “mine.”įinally, as mentioned above, “watashi” could also mean 渡し, which just means “ferry (crossing), ferry (boat),” and can be used as a suffix to indicate a delivery. 私の (watashi-no) has the の particle attached, which is almost like adding a ‘s to a word in English ( almost, I said! Linguist nerds out there, don’t crucify me). So, in this case, 私 gets read “me” in most cases. 私に (watashi-ni) or 私を (watashi-o) suggest that something is happening to or towards you. In this case, it would be read “I” (in most cases). So, 私は (watashi-wa), places the speaker as the topic (and often the subject) of the sentence. Usually, grammatical particles are attached to it to give it a specific use in the sentence. Of course, this word rarely appears by itself. So, the simple meaning of watashi is “I” or “me” and is written 私.
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