Arigatō
« previous post | next post »
There's probably no other Japanese word that is better known to the world than "arigatō". In this little essay, Kaki Okumura attempts to explain why "there is difficulty" means "thank you". This is something that I have often pondered myself, but is that all there is to it? And what about the alleged Buddhist aspects of the expression?
Even the rather full etymology I've quoted below doesn't do full justice to the word.
"The Strange Thing About Writing ‘Thank You’ in Japanese: When life is full of good miracles"
Kaki Okumura, Medium (8/27/21)
…
While many Japanese words directly come from Chinese, such as weather (天気) or emergency (緊急), this is not the case for the term arigato, or ‘thank you’. Instead, the characters for the term were thought to be developed by Buddhist linguists, based on their beliefs toward gratitude.
…
The ability to say thank you is in fact, something difficult to have.
Arigato (有難う) = thank you
Arigatai (有難い) = grateful
The words ‘thank you’ and grateful are actually very similar in Japanese. While thank you reads as arigato, grateful reads as arigatai, and many Japanese people see the two concepts as one and the same. To be thankful is not just to be pleased or relieved, but is also to be grateful, which is to feel appreciation for something done or received.
….
Etymology
| Alternative spellings |
|---|
| 有り難う 有難う |
Phonetic shift: /ariɡataku/ → /ariɡatau/ → /ariɡatoː/.
From ありがたく (arigataku), the adverbial form of Old Japanese and Classical Japanese adjective ありがたし (arigatashi, modern ありがたい arigatai, “grateful, thankful; welcome”), from 有り (ari, the 連用形 (ren'yōkei, continuative or stem form) of verb 有る aru, “to exist, to be”) + 難し (katashi, “hard, difficult”, 難い katai in modern Japanese). The katashi changes to gatashi as an instance of rendaku (連濁).
Modern Japanese -i adjectives formerly ended in -ki for the attributive form. This medial /k/ dropped out during the Muromachi period, both for the attributive form (-ki becoming -i) and for the adverbial form (-ku becoming -u). However, the adverbial form reverted back to -ku thereafter for most words, with the -u ending persisting in certain everyday set expressions, such as arigatō, おはよう (ohayō), or おめでとう (omedetō), and in hyper-formal speech.
Arigatashi is first attested in the oldest literature of the 8th century. Originally meant “difficult to exist, hard to be”, shifting to “rare, special”, and then to “welcome, thankful, nice to have” by some time in the 15th century. This sense is still in use:
-
この天気はありがたいね。 ― Kono tenki wa arigatai ne. ― This weather sure is welcome.
Any resemblance to Portuguese obrigado (“thank you”) is purely coincidental. The Portuguese first arrived in Japan in 1543, well more than a century after citations expressing gratitude are found.
(source)
How do we extrapolate "thankfulness" and "gratitude" from "difficulty"? I think there is a way, but it is well-nigh ineffable. Saying "thank you" in this spirit is the linguistic equivalent of the Japanese aesthetic concepts of wabi-sabi 侘寂 ("a world view centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection") (source).
Selected readings
- "Magi, myrrh, and mummies" (12/24/14) — in the comments
- "Too many recent Japanese loanwords in English?" (7/17/13)
- "The cult(ure) of slothful losers" (6/28/17)
Kris Rhodes said,
September 3, 2021 @ 10:36 am
Getting from 'rare, nice to have' to 'thankful' seems pretty intuitive to me. If someone does something generous for me, that's rare and nice to have, and I'm thankful.
Easy to imagine s future English where something like 'that was nice of you' morphs info a standard thank you phrase.
Rodger C said,
September 3, 2021 @ 10:37 am
"I can't possibly thank you enough."
KevinM said,
September 3, 2021 @ 10:50 am
I read it as a sort of prebuttal of the response, or the concept, "It was nothing." That is, the person is acknowledging that the favor was significant, not trivial.
John Rohsenow said,
September 3, 2021 @ 11:08 am
How about the modern Chinese expression 很难得 Hěn nándé Lit: 'very hard to attain/come by', which can be used to express one's appreciation.
J.W. Brewer said,
September 3, 2021 @ 12:57 pm
Looking at an online list of basic Japanese phrases all visitors should know, I was amused to find "WiFiありますか – Do you have wifi?," which would not have been on such a list when I lived in Japan as a boy in the Seventies. Most of the others I recognized, although I was sad to see that the first sentence I learned in Official Japanese Class (Kore wa hon desu) was omitted. Maybe because "this is a book" is not something one ever has much pragmatic occasion to say, even if it usefully illustrates certain rudiments of Japanese grammar?
Jerry Packard said,
September 3, 2021 @ 1:21 pm
To me, it all seems to make perfect sense given how _thank_ has come to mean what it does, with its origins in the Proto-Indo-European “think, feel”, Proto-Germanic “thought, remembrance, gratitude” and Old English “thought, favour, grace, pleasure, satisfaction, thanks”.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/thank
Victor Mair said,
September 3, 2021 @ 1:50 pm
What about the core "difficult" part.?
Elizabeth S. Okada said,
September 3, 2021 @ 2:43 pm
I've always thought of it as expressing gratitude for the difficulty/trouble the other party has taken for you.
Jerry Packard said,
September 3, 2021 @ 2:53 pm
Yes, good point. For English 'thank', I see no obvious relation to 'difficult.'
But the 难 part of arigatō strikes me as an other-elevating politeness form asserting that the time of a person who is being thanked is more valuable than the time of the person doing the thanking (e.g., 'it is difficult, an imposition, on you').
CuConnacht said,
September 3, 2021 @ 4:12 pm
"Any resemblance to Portuguese obrigado (“thank you”) is purely coincidental. The Portuguese first arrived in Japan in 1543, well more than a century after citations expressing gratitude are found." Thanks for posting that. I have always wondered if it could be a borrowing with the exact form influenced by folk-etymology.
Scott P. said,
September 3, 2021 @ 4:30 pm
English 'thank you' seems to derive from the same root as 'think', as in 'that was thoughtful of you' (or perhaps, 'I am thinking of you in a positive way'?)
Bathrobe said,
September 3, 2021 @ 5:41 pm
The Okumura article is terrible! It goes against everything you have been saying on this blog all this time.
Instead, the characters for the term were thought to be developed by Buddhist linguists, based on their beliefs toward gratitude.
What kind of linguistics is that? "Characters" are not "language". Maybe Buddhists first came up with the term arigatō, I have no idea. But "the characters for the term were thought to be developed by Buddhist linguists"!!!!
While thank you reads as arigato, grateful reads as arigatai, and many Japanese people see the two concepts as one and the same.
Funny that. Maybe it's because they are the same (as your etymological quote rightly points out).
John Rohsenow was right to point to 很难得. It's the same concept. Exactly this: 'very hard to attain/come by', which can be used to express one's appreciation.
Bathrobe said,
September 3, 2021 @ 5:48 pm
Incidentally, the term arigatō came into focus for me decades ago when I was watching an old period drama, in black and white, I think. The speaker expressed his gratitude by saying something like arigatai desu ne. The meaning was crystal clear. The favour that had been received was "hard to come by". Not something that falls from trees or happens just naturally, but something special that is greatly appreciated by the speaker.
Jim Breen said,
September 3, 2021 @ 6:19 pm
Of course, the whole article is based on a totally incorrect premise. Everyone knows that arigato comes from the Portuguese obrigado. It must be true; I read it on Facebook.
Eiríkr Útlendi said,
September 3, 2021 @ 7:52 pm
@CuConnacht —
The indented portion from **Etymology** on down is copied verbatim from the Wiktionary entry at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ありがとう, based mostly on research that I did in various Japanese-language sources.
@Bathrobe —
The root adjective _arigatasi_ appears in the _Man'yōshū_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man'y%C5%8Dsh%C5%AB), an extensive collection of thousands of poems in Japanese (and the odd one partially in Old Ainu, and another probably in Baekje-dialect Old Korean). This poetry is not Buddhist at all, as far as I'm aware. Later quotes also appear in decidedly non-Buddhist contexts, such as _The Tale of Genji_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Genji) of the early 1000s, or the _Utsubo Monogatari_ of the late 900s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utsubo_Monogatari).
And, as you note, _arigatō_ is basically just a lexicalization of the adverbial conjugation of the adjective _arigatai_ — much as the _-hayō_ part in _ohayō gozaimasu_ ("good morning", literally "it is early") is the Kansai-style adverbial form of _hayai_ ("early; fast"), and much as the _-medetō_ in _omedetō gozaimasu_ ("congratulations", literally "it is joyous") is the adverbial form of _medetai_ ("joyous, auspicious, happy"), etc. etc.
Eiríkr Útlendi said,
September 3, 2021 @ 8:07 pm
Separately, but vaguely similarly, the Danish expression used to say _"to like something"_ something parses out somewhat literally as _"to be able suffer something gladly"_: _"kan det lide godt"_. Having grown up with a father from Minnesota, somehow this fits.
Consider also Japanese さようなら (_sayōnara_), literally _"well, if that's the way it is"_ (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%95%E3%82%88%E3%81%86%E3%81%AA%E3%82%89). Seems very Scandihoovian somehow.
Krogerfoot said,
September 3, 2021 @ 8:45 pm
"To be thankful is not just to be pleased or relieved, but is also to be grateful, which is to feel appreciation for something done or received."
Ms. Okumura sees thankful and grateful as having a lot more semantic space between them than I would have thought. Writers certainly love purporting to find ancient mystical wisdom embedded in Japanese people doing and thinking the most ordinary everyday things.
That said, there are quite a few preferred ways, beyond arigatō, to express what's covered by "thanks/I appreciate it" in English. To acknowledge someone's work, ご苦労様/お疲れ様 go-kurō-sama/o-tsukare-sama both focus on the hardships endured/efforts exerted by the listener. Foreigners in Japan quickly realize how often plain old apologies are meant as expressions of gratitude—すみません/申し訳ない/悪いね sumimasen "sorry," mōshiwake nai "there's no excuse [for what I've done]," warui ne "bad [of me], isn't it?" and the like are used (sometimes a bit passive-aggressively) in situations where I'd never dream of begging pardon in another language. So, maybe there is something to the idea that thanking someone in Japanese comes with comparatively more attention to the imposition you've placed on them.
Michael Vnuk said,
September 3, 2021 @ 10:06 pm
First sentence of post: 'There's probably no other Japanese word that is better known to the world than "arigatō".'
Hmm? [Or insert your preferred hummed version of 'I don't know' here.]
What about sushi, sumo, karaoke, sudoko, haiku, futon, ninja, samurai, kamikaze, kimono, origami, manga, tsunami, judo, karate, tofu, bonsai, sake, ramen, sayonara, wasabi, umami, mikado, shogun, tempura, emoji, geisha, and others?
I tested a few of these words in Google Ngram against 'arigato' and 'arigato' barely registers.
However, I am assuming that 'known to the world' means 'used in English texts'. Maybe people 'know' the word but don't use it much. And perhaps I'm too narrow when I look only at English texts, but I don't have a way of assessing the knowedge of the word across the world in comparison to other Japanese words. Another possibility is that 'Japanese word' means a word that is used in Japanese only, but has not been taken into other languages.
(My thoughts arise because, some years ago, I thought of devising a crossword with the heading 'So you think you don't know Japanese?' that I was going to fill with words like those listed above. As with many of my ideas, it never got finished.)
Noel Hunt said,
September 4, 2021 @ 2:44 am
The nuance behind 'arigatai' is very close to the meaning of a sentence quoted by Samuel Martin in his Reference Grammar of Japanese. The sentence in question is 'eyasukaranu zeni no hito', 'a many of uncommon good-will'. 'eyasukaranu' is 'e-yasukaranu', 'e', being the stem form of 'eru', 'to get/obtain'; 'yasukaranu' is the old Japanese negative of 'yasui', 'be simple/easy', thus meaning 'not easily obtained'. This 'yasui' is exactly the opposite in meaning to the 'katai' of 'arigatai', the formation of 'e-yasukaranu' is exactly analogous to 'ari-gatai', i.e., stem (of verb) plus a so-called 'facilitative' (Martin's term), a word like 'yasui', 'easy', 'katai/tsurai', 'difficult'.
~flow said,
September 4, 2021 @ 5:41 am
@Noel Hunt
It just occurred to me that yasui 'simple, easy; cheap' has two antonyms—katai 'hard (like stone), hard (to do, to obtain)' and takai 'high; expensive'.
Batchman said,
September 4, 2021 @ 1:07 pm
The origin of "obrigado" is worthy in and of itself. It clearly comes from Latin "obligatus", literally "bound." The sense afforded is that one is bound (by law or custom) to the favor-bestower in reciprosity for the act for which one is expressing thanks/gratitude. It implicitly sets up a social contract.
Batchman said,
September 4, 2021 @ 1:08 pm
Um, reciprocity. I knew I should have paid attention to the spell checker redlining me.
Alan Shaw said,
September 4, 2021 @ 11:09 pm
Much obliged, @Batchman!
Bathrobe said,
September 5, 2021 @ 3:34 pm
Thank you, Eirikr Utlendi, for that detailed comment on the background of arigatō, especially the history. It’s almost a pity to bring such scholarship to bear on Ms Okumura, who appears to specialise in wishy-washy new-ages feel-good posts on the good things about Japanese culture. (Some of her other posts are admittedly much better than this one.)
Josh R. said,
September 5, 2021 @ 7:47 pm
Michael Vnuk said,
"First sentence of post: 'There's probably no other Japanese word that is better known to the world than "arigatō".'
Hmm? [Or insert your preferred hummed version of 'I don't know' here.]
What about sushi, sumo, karaoke, sudoko, haiku, futon, ninja, samurai, kamikaze, kimono, origami, manga, tsunami, judo, karate, tofu, bonsai, sake, ramen, sayonara, wasabi, umami, mikado, shogun, tempura, emoji, geisha, and others?"
I suspect the distinction he is making is that those are all loanwords in English, while "arigatou" is not. So "arigatou" is probably the best well-known purely Japanese word that does not find use in other languages.
Terry Hunt said,
September 5, 2021 @ 9:57 pm
@ Kris Rhodes:
Easy to imagine s future English where something like 'that was nice of you' morphs info a standard thank you phrase.
I have read of both historically real and fictional characters, and have personally met people, who routinely use(d) the term "Good of you" as a synonym of "Thank you."
번하드 said,
September 7, 2021 @ 3:11 pm
@Eiríkr Útlendi: re: Danish.
Ah, so in Danish this seems to work like in German, where "Ich kann jemand/etwas gut leiden" means "I like somebody/something", despite "leiden"'s usual meaning being "to suffer".
Somebody wiser than me please find out if this can be traced to Germanic or Latin roots:)