Talk:desu

RFV discussion: September 2015–February 2016

The following information has failed Wiktionary's verification process (permalink).

Failure to be verified means that insufficient eligible citations of this usage have been found, and the entry therefore does not meet Wiktionary inclusion criteria at the present time. We have archived here the disputed information, the verification discussion, and any documentation gathered so far, pending further evidence.
Do not re-add this information to the article without also submitting proof that it meets Wiktionary's criteria for inclusion.

---

desu as a purportedly English term

Can anyone confirm and document 1) whether this is actually in widespread-enough English usage to potentially meet WT:CFI, and 2) whether such usage really qualifies as English, as opposed to intra-speech-community code switching, using desu precisely because it is specifically a Japanese term? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 21:57, 18 September 2015 (UTC)

The good news: the definitions are accurate, and the term is used in certain restricted (chiefly online) communities. The bad news: I can't figure out for the life of me how to find cites. BGC gives up naught I can find, nor does rec.arts.anime.misc on GGC. Looks like a job for... @Cloudcuckoolander! —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 04:34, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

(*looks up into the night sky and sees the Cite Signal*)

(*climbs in Citemobile and rushes to RfV*)

So I was able to cite the second sense. There were just enough viable cites to be found in rec.arts.anime.misc, but they were buried among instances of romanized Japanese. I also took the liberty of converting it to an interjection, since it definitely wasn't functioning as an adjective. Not sure about the first sense. -Cloudcuckoolander (talk) 06:47, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

The desu in English seems a particle rather than an interjection. In all the citations, it is used at the end of a sentence. — TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 10:47, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

• Can anyone cite the adjective sense? The interjection examples are all clear cases where desu is being used precisely because it's a Japanese term, in a kind of code switching. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 07:07, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

  Code switching is subtly different. Probably a majority of uses of desu in this kind of context are grammatically incorrect if you translate the sentence to Japanese, because a copula isn't needed or suru would be used, or whatever the issue may be. The use of desu has new rules: it indicates Japaneseness (or really weeabooness), and its new syntactical rule is that it goes at the end of a sentence, sometimes preceded by a comma, regardless of whether the sentence is complete or a fragment. That's a lot different from code switching by bilinguals, which is a purely social phenomenon that preserves the original semantic and syntactic metadata for words used as much as possible even when switching languages. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 15:53, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

As I understand it, code-switching is when people who fluently speak two languages blend both during spoken conversation, as is the case with "Spanglish." It's the unconscious byproduct of being bilingual, and thus thinking in more than one language. Whereas "desu" is a deliberate borrowing of a Japanese term by English speakers. It's selectively plucking a specific word out of Japanese and inserting it into English sentences. That doesn't require fluency in Japanese to do. -Cloudcuckoolander (talk) 20:40, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

• Thank you both for the cogent explanations. I am convinced in this case. I think it's worth noting that code switching does not require fluency, merely familiarity; that said, the changes in how desu is used in English utterances vs. Japanese utterances appear to be significant enough to warrant recognition that EN desu != JA です.

I would still like to see the adjective sense cited. This usage is more linguistically interesting to me, as a clear innovation in use and meaning, and not just copycatting. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 00:56, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

• Interjection sense passed; adjective sense failed. —Mr. Granger (talk • contribs) 01:27, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

No real meaning indicated

In the current version there is no real indication of what "desu" means, neither in the definition ("imitate Japanese sentence structure" – so what?), nor in usage notes, nor in etymology. Google helps way more. JWBTH (talk) 08:01, 6 January 2024 (UTC)