rintaun

3,184 reputation

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bio	website	rintaun.tumblr.com
	location	Pittsburgh, PA
	age	26
visits	member for	2 years
	seen	Apr 29 at 1:32
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I graduated from Ohio University in 2011 with a B.A. in Linguistics with a minor in Japanese. Nearly half of my time enrolled at Ohio was spent studying at Chubu University near Nagoya, Japan. I plan eventually to go to graduate school for foreign language education, to become certified to teach Japanese at the secondary level.

In the mean time, however, I program (primarily in PHP and SQL). I also recently began working as a freelance Japanese-to-English translator, though I've translated anime and manga as a hobby in the past.

	3,184 reputation	bio	website	rintaun.tumblr.com	visits	member for	2 years
430 badges		location	Pittsburgh, PA		seen	Apr 29 at 1:32

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118 Comments

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Apr 9	comment	Interpretation of て+もらえる Sounds like a bad translation; @istrasci's interpretation seems spot-on.
Apr 8	comment	What is the よっか in はじめよっか? @dainichi It is shortened, but "it" in this case refers to the vowel, not the word. ;)
Dec 5	comment	Why do Japanese people read Classical Japanese with a set of weird sound shifts? The problem with teaching the classical pronunciations instead of a system to turn them into modern Japanese is that you have to them a whole new vocabulary, because instead of teaching them a set of transformations that allows them to arrive at きょう from けふ, you have to teach them that けふ means きょう, which may be fine for just one word, but is way less efficient when you have to teach them all the words.
Dec 5	comment	Why do Japanese people read Classical Japanese with a set of weird sound shifts? @EricDong, the changes you mentioned in English are not actually sound changes; they are grammatical changes. This may seem like a petty distinction, but it really isn't. In fact, we read old words in "modern English" all the time, and we do have a ton of rules for how to do it -- like "you don't pronounce the e at the end of a word; instead it makes the vowel before it long" (e.g. in "cake"). The only difference is that the Japanese reformed their "spelling" after these sound changes, and we English speakers basically did not.
Dec 5	comment	Possible ways to express remembrance and recall Apologies, there is one more difference: remember can be used to mean "keep something in memory" (e.g. I'll remember that) whereas recall can only mean "bring back from memory".
Dec 5	comment	Possible ways to express remembrance and recall I don't think that in regard to memory and experience, remember and recall have the strong difference in connotation you are suggesting. There may be some very small difference, but in common usage they are extremely close synonyms. It is only in recall's other usages that it differs.
Nov 30	comment	i-adjectives used as na-adjectives: is there a difference? (e.g. 大きい versus 大きな) I awarded the bounty here because your notes on the possible etymology of these words is very interesting. Thanks!
Nov 30	comment	How can I express that X is as big/small/fast/… as Y? Is it sad that ほど didn't even cross my mind? >_< Thanks for pointing it out lol
Nov 29	comment	Etymology of ごちそうさまでした The previous question should then be edited to include a slightly broader scope and I would suggest that @user1205935 move his answer there.
Nov 29	comment	Kana to kanji mapping for a rōmaji keyboard @snailplane Apologies. "1:1" was certainly not the best term here; I didn't mean to imply that any kana combination would map to exactly one kanji. I'm not sure how to explain how my brain is interpreting that, since it obviously doesn't make sense.
Nov 29	comment	What's the difference between Ichidan/Godan and Ru/U verbs classification? I'm looking for it, but I can't find it. There are various ～て form songs, but they're just not the same. I still remember it, though!
Nov 29	comment	What is the difference between 越える and 越す and are they truly transitive verbs? @Tim I believe that compounds like 乗り越える usually get most of their features from the final verb, and that this case is no different. So they are intransitive, as well.
Nov 28	comment	The reading of 砂利 I feel like there are other words that do this "inexplicably voicing the first mora" thing too (though I can't think of any examples off the top of my head), so maybe those could offer some insight into #2.
Nov 27	comment	Where does「えっと」come from? Though I agree that it's probably just a sound, I think it's interesting given constructions such as 「ええとですね」
Nov 27	comment	Difference in word use: 父親母親両親父母 There's 親父 and お袋, too :)
Nov 27	comment	Can もらう mean to keep? 先生から本をもらった still seems to suggest a change of ownership to me, though I certainly could be mistaken.
Nov 27	comment	i-adjectives used as na-adjectives: is there a difference? (e.g. 大きい versus 大きな) I'm sorry, but as a linguist I cannot accept the explanation that "Japanese is a mess."
Nov 27	comment	i-adjectives used as na-adjectives: is there a difference? (e.g. 大きい versus 大きな) @user1205935 Good point. I recall that I came across the idea of 連体詞 when investigating this originally, but I was never able to find an explanation for why this occurs with certain adjectives. I'm also not sure that your examples actually fall into this category, either; they seem different in that they are perfectly acceptable nouns, i.e. without neither い nor な attached.
Nov 27	comment	i-adjectives used as na-adjectives: is there a difference? (e.g. 大きい versus 大きな) @Billy Also, I've done some looking around, and though my language sense agrees that 大き[な] cannot be used declaratively, it seems to be used (though somewhat infrequently) in various places on the internet. It could simply be typographical errors, however, so it's difficult to say for certain. Additionally, though 大きな may be preferred attributively, I'm not sure that is true of the other na-form adjectives in the list. I'd be really interested to hear more detailed information, though!
Nov 27	comment	i-adjectives used as na-adjectives: is there a difference? (e.g. 大きい versus 大きな) @Billy #3b would definitely include historical reasons why they accidentally arose as exceptions if that is the case. And though a definitive "no" on #2 may not be possible per se, further examples of this phenomenon, if they exist, would equally well satisfy the question. Of course, I say the best answer would answer all fully, but that is like the platonic ideal of the best answer, not any good answer in general.