A week or two ago, I learned an interesting expression at work: 야자타임 [yajataim]. This is a slang term that means “A time when normal formalities, especially deferential language, can be temporarily suspended.”
I was excited to learn this term, because it could actually be useful with my students, in the event they are being too formal, which is sometimes an issue with certain socially awkward kids. It isn’t normally a problem if they’re speaking English, since Korean students are taught, erroneously, that English utterly lacks levels of formality. Of course English has lots of levels of formality, it’s just that we don’t use verb-endings and noun substitutions to pull it off, generally speaking. There tends to be a lot of just periphrastic substitution, e.g. “Gimme that” vs “Could you hand that to me, please?”
The etymology isn’t very clear to me on the first part of the term, but the second part -타임 [taim] is transparently the fully nativized borrowing from English, “time,” which is used in for a variety of meanings and contexts, some of which are similar to the English semantics, such as this one, and others where it has acquired new, weirdly different semantics – as in e.g. its broad use as one of the “noun counter particles” for listing the numbers of class periods at schools.
Anyway, the first part I can’t quite figure out, but I’d say the 야 [ya] is probably the vocative particle used for addressing inferiors (“Hey, you!”), which makes sense in context. As a guess, the 자 [ja] might be the verb propositive ending, i.e. “Let’s….” It all fits together neatly, in semantic terms: “Let’s [have] ‘hey you’ time,” but the grammar seems like an unholy mess.
[daily log: walking, 7km]
Caveat: 야자타임
One comment
Comments are closed.
I wish that German had such a way for temporarily suspending formalities when the circumstances make such formality (temporarily) awkward. I recently had such a situation. Luckily, I knew the situation was coming and knew we would be speaking English, so I simply asked my German counterpart in advance for permission to address them by first name during the course of that business meeting. But I can recall many other times when such a situation arose spontaneously and there was no easy way to escape the awkwardness.
In German, the move from formal to informal address is permanent (except when used in disputes or similarly emotional situations where it can have a defusing effect by introducing a buddy-buddy casualness or have a derogatory effect by degrading the other, depending on the circumstances, whence saying it to the police can land you in jail). Indeed, only once have I had someone ask to move back to formal address, which I (and the people I’ve talked to about it) considered quite an affront. I wonder whether Korean is less rigid in this respect.
By the way, there’s a very common joke in German about the lack of purely grammatical formal address in English. The joke (always spoken in English) takes a standard German phrase that includes formal address and translates it into English, thus striping it of its meaning. The joke is:
“You may say ‘you’ to me.”
This sentence is a translation of the German phrase “Sie dürfen ‘du’ zu mir sagen” (= “You (honorific) may say ‘you’ (casual) to me”), which is a phrase Germans commonly use when offering to switch to the informal form of address.