Matt

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	6,415 reputation	bio	website	no-sword.jp/blog	visits	member for	1 year, 10 months
1326 badges		location			seen	Sep 4 '12 at 13:09

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Jun 20	comment	Why is the Japanese currency pronounced “yen” in English? "Why is '$' is used instead of writing 'dollar'?" Because it is an abbreviation. But ¥ is not an abbreviation of 円 in any meaningful sense (both are just one character long). It was clearly invented by analogy with $, but why bother when 円 (or 圓) already existed? This is a reasonable question (not really about "Japanese", admittedly). Furthermore, since ¥ was clearly modelled on Western usage, and we say "yen" in English for no obvious reason, it does not seem prima facie unreasonable to wonder whether ¥ is pronounced /yen/ in Japanese too, distinct from 円 /en/.
Jun 19	awarded	Civic Duty
Jun 14	comment	What do you call these words? Right, I'm not sure that "onomatopoeia" is the right word either. But I think the shared morphophonemic characteristics (gemination, ending in -ri, possibly relatable to onomatopoeic or otherwise mimetic roots?) are what is of interest, not the fact that they are adverbs.
Jun 14	comment	What do you call these words? I think Chris is looking for a word like "onomatopoeia" or "psychomimesis" rather than asking what part of speech they are.
Jun 8	reviewed	Approve suggested edit on What exactly is 我, and how is it used?
Jun 1	comment	What is the te-form of 問う? I'd just like to note that "this unusual conjunction came about" is a bit misleading; this is a perfectly normal conjunction in much of (modern) Western Japan, and you can trace the split back to how the onbin changes worked out in medieval times. The question is really why the premodern/western-dialect form was retained/adopted as an irregular form in what eventually became Standard Japanese for just a few verbs (問う, 乞う, etc.)
May 31	comment	Why are there two words 算数 and 数学 representing different fields? I like this answer, but I think there is a historical component too. IIRC 算数 was taught in terakoya schools and considered a practical skill useful for business, etc.; 数学 comes from a more "academic" tradition, and was the vessel into which Western mathematics was eventually poured. But I haven't had time to look up proper references.
May 29	comment	Why do TV subtitles use spaces (instead of commas)? Incidentally, I do not know if Pacerier's subtitles were actually added by the producer, but I can vouch for having seen similar orthography watching live Japanese TV with the subtitles on. I am less confident about having seen spaces after は and so on, but I have definitely seen spaces after ねえ, あたし, etc. (basically corresponding to pauses in speech).
May 29	comment	Why do TV subtitles use spaces (instead of commas)? @TsuyoshiIto I think you might be surprised by how many Japanese TV shows have subtitles (in Japanese) these days. Look for the little 字-in-a-box symbols in a TV guide, like this one: tbs.co.jp/tv/daily/?20120529 .
May 28	comment	What does ちがいます。 mean? Actually, let me add one important caveat to that "-i adjective chigai" thing: the interesting part is that for many of these speakers whenever it would appear as "chigai", it appears as "chigau" instead. You might say that they treat "chigau" as an -i adjective that happens to have an irregular plain/dictionary form ending in -u instead of -i.
May 27	comment	What does ちがいます。 mean? @dotnetN00b There's no standard Japanese path from "chigau" to "chigakunai", but that's not what those speakers are doing. The evidence suggests that they have an -i adjective "chigai" in their lexicon. Note that people also say "chigee yo!" (like "takee yo!" for "takai yo!"), "chigakatta", etc. One reason for this reanalysis might be the fact that, in this usage, the (original) verb "chigau" is more stative than dynamic -- it describes how something is rather than what something does, so in some ways it's more adjective-y.
May 25	comment	What does ちがいます。 mean? ちがくない is perfectly grammatical in the idiolects of the people who (non-ironically) use it... it's just not standard.
May 24	comment	Kanji 何: why is it missing in 今なにしてる (facebook text in status editbox)? Good point. Another possible reason for 誰 in hiragana in some contexts is that (incredibly) it wasn't on the Joyo Kanji list until 2010.
May 24	comment	Kanji 何: why is it missing in 今なにしてる (facebook text in status editbox)? Re the second point, note that it is fairly common to write "今、何してる" but less common (still not unheard of) to write "今、なにしてる". I have always understood this sort of thing as being due to vague aversion to "writing two kanji letters in a row when they do not form one word", as Tsuyoshi explains. Inserting a comma between them is another way of keeping them from running together.
May 22	comment	understanding hōgejaku — an archaic imperative? You're welcome! I updated the answer with this information. The short version is that 著 and 着 used to be variant ways of writing the "same" character. The separation in meaning/pronunciation between them seems to be native to Japan. I suppose that Nelson is showing the standard Japanese readings (promulgated by MEXT etc.) rather than the full historical mess.
May 22	revised	understanding hōgejaku — an archaic imperative? added 971 characters in body
May 21	revised	understanding hōgejaku — an archaic imperative? added 162 characters in body
May 21	answered	understanding hōgejaku — an archaic imperative?
May 18	comment	Does 切った mean to “cut out” or “cut from”? How about if you visualize it as a line on a graph "cutting" through another line as it goes down?
May 17	comment	What are the rules determining the use of the dash in katakana? @istrasci Nah, most speakers do actually pronounce けいたい "kē-tai", including many people who believe they are actually saying "ke-i-tai".