Wow, I'm glad I came here and saw this today :eek: This is definitely a great thing to know.

When you write a novel in third person, you can write 「いいえと言った者」.
It does not sound arrogant in a novel.

This is one of those times I'm glad I never started using a word. I automatically go to 方 when I'm not going to use 人. Is there a time where 者 is the best word to use, rather than 方／人? I guess, as YuriTokoro said, in a novel as the third-person, right? 者 sounds sort of detached, right? Hence why a third-person narrator or dictator might use it.

Right?

In that case, it would mean a science article might use 者 as well in certain circumstances.

I’m afraid; I don’t see what “sort of detached” means.
You can use者 in a scientific paper.
And you can say it when you mean yourself.
For example, (in a hotel)
「123号室の者ですが、キーを部屋の中に置いたまま出てきてしまいま した。合い鍵で開けていただけますか 」
I'm staying in room 123. I (have) locked [shut] myself out. (I left the room with a key in it.) Can you please send someone with a master key to open the door?

“者”の検索結果（25041 件）：英辞郎 on the Web：スペースアルク

By "detached" I mean something like scientific, factual, unemotional, scholarly, objective, cold. And this is generally what someone means when they talk about "detached" mood of a speaking style.

For example, a sociologist describing the results of an experiment will write an article. In the article, often "detached" language is used. In English, this is often technical writing. Another aspect is that in detached writing you use the passive a lot more ("the result was calculated" instead of "I calculated the result") and you don't use first-person pronouns (I, we, us, me, my, our).

So, in a normal conversation I might say "I calculated the result." In detached, scientific writing, you might say "The result was..." or "The result was calculated" or "The researcher calculated the results."

Thank you for explaining.
Sometimes 者 sounds detached, but it depends on the situation.
It may sound cold, yes.
But it may be also used as a humble term.
When you use 者 as a humble term, it isn’t scientific, factual, unemotional, scholarly, objective or cold. (As the example sentence I have written in my last post.)

In Japanese, we use the passive a lot in a scientific paper, too.
"the result was calculated" may be 「結果は～と推測される」
We don’t say 「私は結果を～と推測する」
（I have studied medical translating.:mtongue: ）

By the way, do you know the Japanese honorifics?

Understood. Thank you.


Do you mean like さん、さま、ちゃん、くん、どの、先生、氏、先輩、後 輩? I think the only other one I can think of without looking to Wikipedia is 陛下.