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There are some similar mechanism in Japanese. "Anata" is generally considered to mean "you" (more formal than the informal"omae") -- but it is too familiar for general use (it can often be translated as "dear", depending on context). The safest approach is usually name+san.

Japanese is also often used without pronouns (in general it can be a surprisingly terse language for having rather few grammatical markers).

I have no knowledge of Sinhalese -- but from the description above it sound surprisingly similar to Japanese. Incidentally, Japanese is so different (grammatically) from many other languages that it is allowed as a "other" language when studying linguistics -- along with Maori and certain tribal languages. I wonder if Sinhalese wouldn't qualify as well.




Most Japanese pronouns are also associated with gender (as in, the gender of the person using the word, not who it's referring to). Anata is mildly feminine, omae is rather masculine. But like Sinhalese, polite Japanese goes to great lengths to avoid using the "you" pronoun, people are usually referred to by last name, title, job description etc instead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pronouns




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