Tuesday, June 22, 2010

「お大事に」。 ("o dai ji ni")

Just realized that 「お大事に」, a common "seeya"/"take care" expression, is probably an abbreviation for 体を/気をお大事にしてください [karada o / ki o] odaiji ni shite kudasai, "please treat your spirit/person/self as a very important thing". A form of 「に する」 ni suru. I'm not so familiar with those constructions and was reading about them earlier when I was trying to translate something from Genji. Hmm.

It's great to have Google to test out language constructions.
"お大事にしてください": ~269k hits
"お大事にして下さい": ~683k hits
"お大事にして": ~19.7 million hits, almost every one of them followed by 下さい or ください
So there may be something off with Google's counting.

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