English

Suffix

-san

1. Honorific ending used to indicate a person is Japanese or talking with Japanese, or treated like Japanese.

   TIME, August 1, 1983:

   Tanaka-San’s Decline and Rise

   Wall Street Journal, December 16, 2008

   Barack Obama-san

   WalletPop, January 31, 2009

   Obama-san! President's book of speeches is a huge hit in Japan

Translations

Irish

Alternative forms

• -sean (used after palatalized consonants and front vowels)

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /sˠənˠ/

Suffix

-san

1. emphatic suffix of the third-person singular masculine; used after velarized consonants and back vowels
2. emphatic suffix of the third-person plural; used after velarized consonants and back vowels

Usage notes

Spelled with a hyphen after -s, otherwise without a hyphen.

• Added to nouns (or adjectives modifying a noun) in the presence of the possessive adjective to emphasize the possessor rather than the thing possessed:

  a mhadrasan‎ ― his dog

  a gcarr deargsan‎ ― their red car

• Added to pronouns (both simple and prepositional) to add emphasis (not to create a reflexive pronoun):

  as-san‎ ― out of him

  siadsan, iadsan‎ ― they, them

• Added to synthetic verb forms to add emphasis to the subject (third-person plural only as there are no third-person singular synthetic forms):

  chualadarsan‎ ― they heard

Derived terms

Related terms

• -ne
• -sa

Japanese

Romanization

-san

1. rōmaji reading of さん

Scottish Gaelic

Suffix

-san

1. -self, -selves (emphatic)

Usage notes

• Added to prepositional pronouns to add emphasis (not to create a reflexive pronoun).
• Used in third-person singular masculine (eg aigesan).
• Used in third-person plural (eg orrasan).
• When the last letter of the prepositional pronoun is s, a hyphen is put before the suffix (eg leis-san).

Derived terms

See also

• -e
• -sa
• -se