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| bio | website | no-sword.jp/blog |
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| 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 30 |
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When grandmas tell their kids お天道様がみてるよ, how do the kids know who お天道様 is? Well, it's not as commonly used as "God" (that was a flaw in my analogy, I guess), and I don't know of any kids' books that use it, but I think most Japanese people have at least heard the word and know how it's used. (Silvermaple didn't say it was uncommon, just that people might not be able to define it exactly.) If you had a grandma that used it, you would learn it, because her use of the word would teach it to you. And if you didn't, eventually you would hear it from someone else. It may die out in a few generations if non-grandmas have stopped using it, of course, like any other word. |
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Jul 27 |
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What is the correct veritable meaning of 水無月 and 神無月? @Chris Vovin doesn't mention these two specific words at all (at least as far as I can see) -- I'm just quoting him more generally on the /na/ particle. |
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Jul 26 |
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What is the correct veritable meaning of 水無月 and 神無月? Er, /topo.to.hito/ = /topo.tu.pito/, 遠人 |
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Jul 26 |
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What is the correct veritable meaning of 水無月 and 神無月? @Chris I picked Vovin because I remembered he had an idiosyncratic but well-argued view about this /na/, basically! |
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Jul 26 |
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What is the correct veritable meaning of 水無月 and 神無月? @ZhenLin He calls it a "genitive-locative case marker", but warns that the /tu/ in words like /taka.tu.sima/ and /topo.to.hito/ is a different morpheme which is, in his opinion, originally some sort of copula. |
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Jul 23 |
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Why is「ん」the only kana without a vowel? Labrune also writes extensively on this topic in The Phonology of Japanese (2012). |
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Jul 19 |
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What is the meaning of 女子力? One difference is the diff. between 女子 and 女. Another is that 女子力 implies a kind of active mastery, where 女らしさ is more of an emergent trait. Like any other kind of power, 女子力 is a means to an end. |
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Jul 18 |
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Are 弱い相互作用 and 強い相互作用 unnatural? @sawa I don't read very deeply in physics so I almost always encounter the idea introduced explicitly: "the four fundamental forces are called...". I do remember seeing it often used with the definite article, though, which is a way (unavailable in Japanese) of reminding the reader that the reference is to a specific type of interaction/force and not just to any and all interactions that could be characterized as weak. |
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Jul 18 |
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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 |
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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 11 |
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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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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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. |
