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Nihonjin no Shiranai Nihongo (The Japanese language the Japanese people don't
know) seems to be claiming, at around 6:20 of [this YouTube
clip](http://youtu.be/z8IwcU6xuuE?t=6m20s) of language-specific portions of
episode 4 of the show, that desu and masu were endings geisha originally used,
but that during the meiji period, samurai visiting geisha in Edo (nowadays
Tokyo) misinterpreted it as part of Edo's dialect and spread it across the
country.

However, googling either for `masu desu geisha`, or `teineigo`
([apparently](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/882/does-%E6%95%AC%E8%AA%9E-keigo-
just-mean-politeness-or-is-it-a-technical-term-specifically/890#890) a
[term](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorific_speech_in_Japanese#Polite_language)
that covers desu and masu) and `geisha` doesn't get any hits corroborating
this claim, apart from pages citing Nihonjin no Shiranai Nihongo. Is this
claim more amusing than backed up by factual evidence?

(Sections at or before 6:20 also has Haruko-sensei using terms translated as
"standard Japanese" and "common Japanese", but I can't transcribe the original
words)
CC BY-SA 3.0
2011-10-21T14:47:03.227
3525
2011-10-22T07:03:37.200
2017-04-13T12:43:44.397
-1
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question
politeness history
Was desu and masu originally geisha-speak?
The basic idea is correct but the details are a bit oversimplified (as you
might expect for a comic essay become a TV show).

です did indeed originate in the red light districts of Edo (if you like), but
we are not only talking about "geisha" here. First of all, there were men in
that industry as well, and they also used です and ます; so did regular customers
(if they wanted to be hip). The words even spread to regular townsfolk to a
certain extent. But it is correct to say that です was considered lower-class
and not the kinds of words samurai should use. This was about the 18th
century.

Note that at this point です did not have the conjugations でした and so on, and
nor was it considered "the polite version of だ". This happened in the 19th
century and is really more of a Meiji thing than an Edo thing. This is also
when we see です spreading out to more general usage, including in the upper
class. The key driver is not "mistaken samurai", but rather the influence of
women's language, including the language of geisha and other "flower-and-
willow world" workers, on 山{やま}の手言葉{てことば} (the language of upper-class
Edo→Tokyo society). This is a complex and interesting subject on which entire
books have been written, but basically you see a lot of women with close ties
to the world of geisha, including ex-geisha themselves coming into the
households of the new upper class, as wives and also as "help" including
child-minders. The makeup of this "upper class" was also itself in flux, as
was all of Japanese society, really, once the Meiji period got going.

So it isn't so much that samurai got it wrong and spread the word around the
country (although no doubt there were samurai who did get it wrong, and became
the butt of jokes among people who knew better!). It's more that the limited
set of people, particularly women, who originally used the word found
themselves in key positions (wives, mothers, nurses, trendsetters) to
influence the speech of the post-Restoration upper class. It was this upper
class who made their speech the "standard," and the rest is history.

ます I am less sure about -- I know there are examples from the Muromachi period
and in some of the Portuguese materials (so, appearing in the speech of or at
least familiar to the samurai class), but I don't know if they can be directly
connected with the current 丁寧語{ていねいご} "ます". (For example, there was an earlier
です, deriving from でそうろう, but it is not the ancestor of the modern です.)
However, if modern ます does derive from the language of geisha, I would expect
that it became "standard" via the same processes rather than by samurai making
mistakes.
CC BY-SA 3.0
2011-10-21T22:27:23.730
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2011-10-22T02:03:36.623
2011-10-22T02:03:36.623
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answer