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| bio | website | no-sword.jp/blog |
|---|---|---|
| location | ||
| age | ||
| visits | member for | 1 year, 10 months |
| seen | Sep 4 '12 at 13:09 | |
| stats | profile views | 151 |
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Jul 18 |
comment |
Does the kanji 妾 still get used by women to refer to themselves? Yeah, that could cause confusion. In that case I would probably use /ro:/ because the slashes are a sort of rough phonemic transcription, but that would be even less clearer to non-specialists than ろう, probably. |
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Jul 17 |
comment |
Does the kanji 妾 still get used by women to refer to themselves? No particular reason, I just didn't see much point in using kana to indicate the sounds, so I figured I may as well leave it in romaji. If someone wants to edit it to a different style, I won't roll it back. |
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Jul 17 |
answered | Does the kanji 妾 still get used by women to refer to themselves? |
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Jul 17 |
answered | 不被下候: When was it common, and what were the rules? |
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Jul 11 |
comment |
What is the etymology of the word プラスアルファ? Thanks, @Dono! I'll be keeping an eye out for something more specific myself (if it can be said with such confidence to be a misreading, we should also have documentation of that specific event) but those sources certainly fall on the reliable side of the fence. |
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Jul 11 |
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What is the etymology of the word プラスアルファ? @Dono Do you have a good reference backing up the origin as a misreading of "+x"? A quick Googling revealed only unsourced hearsay. (Not challenging you on the specifics, just looking for a reliable account of the etymology.) |
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Jul 4 |
comment |
Why is 一緒に needed when it's already clear two people will be together? @sawa I find both of those unnatural, but I think the verb has something to do with it too: "The kids fought w.o.t." (ok), "The kids fought t." (not ok), "The kids fought t. w.o.t." (not ok); but, "The kids played w.o.t." (ok), "The kids played t." (ok), "The kids played t. w.o.t." (not ok); but, "The kids worked t. w.o.t." (redundant, but more natural than "went shopping t. w.o.t.", and "worked together" feels like a constituent) |
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Jul 4 |
answered | Why doesn't 分かる have a potential form? |
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Jul 4 |
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Why is 一緒に needed when it's already clear two people will be together? @sawa Rephrasing to avoid that problem, "My mum and I went shopping together with my dad" also feels a bit unnatural (not ungrammatical), but "My mum and I went shopping with my dad" does not. So maybe even when "together" could function as a VP adverb, the combination of "together" and "with X" feels unnatural for semantic reasons (e.g. "Together" already describes the makeup and relationship of the participant group, which may "disallow" adding another participant using "with X"), and this motivates a reanalysis as "together with X", which is awkward. |
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Jul 4 |
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Why is 一緒に needed when it's already clear two people will be together? @sawa But in this situation, "go shopping together" cannot be a constituent, because the subject is singular ("I"). (OTOH, "My dad and I went shopping together" and "I went shopping with my dad" are both totally natural.) Perhaps this is the problem: because the non-plural subject does not allow "go shopping together" as a constituent, "together with my dad" is reanalyzed as a semi-independent sentence-level adverbial phrase, and this feels awkward. |
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Jul 3 |
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Why is 一緒に needed when it's already clear two people will be together? (Incidentally I suspect that a similar (structural) explanation may hold for the difference between と and と一緒に, so the phenomenon may come down to which kind of adverbial modifier is "preferred" or "default" in a given language/situation.) |
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Jul 3 |
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Why is 一緒に needed when it's already clear two people will be together? @sawa Ironically I know even less about the formal description of English grammar than Japanese, but my subjective feeling is that while "with my dad" functions as a simple (VP-level) adverb, "together with my dad" is more like a sentence-level adverb, or perhaps even attached to the noun. So "with my dad" simply indicates that the action was performed along with "my dad", but "together with my dad" is more marked and may suggest that the addition of "my dad" is unexpected. |
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Jul 3 |
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Why is 一緒に needed when it's already clear two people will be together? My native speaker intuition says that "Go shopping together with dad" is much less natural than "お父さんと一緒に買い物に行く". "Needed" may not be the correct word but I think that it is quite reasonable to wonder what underlies the fact that "一緒に" appears much more often in Japanese than "together" does in English, when both are equally "unnecessary" from a pure meaning standpoint. Not because the Japanese way is "illogical" or anything, but simply because there must be a reason for the difference and that reason is probably interesting. |
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Jul 2 |
revised |
Indicative form of an i-adjective used adverbially added 521 characters in body |
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Jul 2 |
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Indicative form of an i-adjective used adverbially Yep, there are lots in English. "Damned straight," "heaps hard" (is this one Australia-specific?). "Hella", arguably. Japanese has other words like ちょう with similar flexibility (ちょう暑い, ちょう行く, etc.) which is why I think it's a general process of words being ground down to non-inflecting intensifiers, rather than something specific to -i adjectives as such. |
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Jul 2 |
answered | Indicative form of an i-adjective used adverbially |
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Jun 22 |
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What are the rules for substituting の with ん? @taylor As sawa says, にて→で (evolution of the particle で) is a historical change; it is very well attested, but it is fully lexicalized by now -- I don't believe that にて is an "underlying phonetic form" of で in any meaningful sense in contemporary Japanese. So the environment is "everywhere that で is/was used", but the place to look is not contemporary Japanese phonology -- you have to go way back. "A History of the Japanese Language" (Frellesvig 2010) covers this issue and several related ones very well. |
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Jun 21 |
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ないで vs なくて How to correlate two or more phrases with negative verbs +1 for bibliography |
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Jun 21 |
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Why is the Japanese currency pronounced “yen” in English? @sawa Sure, as I said I agree that there are reasons for the ¥ symbol (actually I find these issues around the edges of writing systems very interesting and worthwhile). I just don't think that the issue is so clear-cut that any question about it must be the result of cultural bias. (But, in point of fact, the questioner does not seem upset by what you said, so this conversation is really just you and me debating for fun... we'd better cut it out, or start a new + more specific question perhaps.) |
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Jun 20 |
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Why is the Japanese currency pronounced “yen” in English? @sawa My first point is more about writing + clutter than reading. "$2" is much more concise and faster to write than "2 dollars", but "¥2" doesn't seem to have the same advantages over "2円" (or "二円"). I understand that there are good reasons to have a ¥ symbol as well as the 円 character in usage, I just think that, because the two cases aren't exactly the same, failure to intuit those reasons doesn't have to be due to cultural bias. It is a bit subjective, I guess, but in this case I feel like OP deserved the benefit of the doubt. |
