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| bio | website | |
|---|---|---|
| location | Toronto, Canada | |
| age | 32 | |
| visits | member for | 1 year, 9 months |
| seen | May 19 '12 at 19:10 | |
| stats | profile views | 30 |
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Nov 5 |
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What does なんたらという mean? I've never heard of any idiolect that has the metasyntactic variables listed in the OP. They look completely foreign to me. |
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Nov 5 |
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Why are some words written backwards on trucks "For a Japanese person, switching from up to down to right to left is pretty much just as valid as left to right." But then how should they decide which way to switch? And as readers, aren't they stuck with trial and error to figure out which way the writer intended? (It would be neat if someone could give an example of a pseudo-palindrome that is meaningful "backwards" but means something different...) |
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Nov 5 |
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What is だって when it's at the beginning of a sentence? Is it similar to だから? |
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Oct 26 |
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Article versus postposition @Axioplase I would say that "how do children learn?" is actually one of the least simple questions there is! ;) |
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Oct 26 |
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Repeating the vowel sound of the mora that precedes gemination in songs Well, I didn't hear a glottal stop in the examples I'm recalling, and it certainly seems awkward to me when I attempt it. |
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Oct 26 |
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What does the だと mean in 日本だと? Why does everyone keep assuming I'm expecting a 1 to 1 mapping?! |
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Oct 26 |
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Passive + Noun. Who did what? @Chris true, but only if you can get the subject and object the right way around when converting from passive to active, which seems to have been the OP's difficulty. Solution: don't skip steps: we explicitly state that the person is loved, and therefore it's everyone who loves. |
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Oct 26 |
answered | Repeating the vowel sound of the mora that precedes gemination in songs |
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Oct 26 |
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What does the だと mean in 日本だと? Why isn't (apparently) a particle needed in Japanese to indicate the "in" in the phrase "if/when in Japan, ..."? |
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Oct 26 |
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What does the だと mean in 日本だと? Well, what game are we talking about? Is it or isn't it actually known in Japan by the supplied name? Seems like this is trivial to answer with that knowledge :) |
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Oct 26 |
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Article versus postposition I guess you could argue that Japanese postpositions (at least, the ones that readily come to mind) are a sort of case marker, but then... が -> subjective, を -> objective, の -> genitive, に -> dative? (Latin distinguished dative from ablative, but German does not, and I suspect Japanese doesn't really either) - and then you have わ, which is something else entirely. The best I can think of is "contextual"; certainly the part of speech it denotes is unlike any found in any European language I can think of. |
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Oct 21 |
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Does it matter whether you drop vowels in spoken Japanese? That seems practically impossible at the speed that spoken Japanese normally seems to go at... x.x |
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Oct 21 |
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Does it matter whether you drop vowels in spoken Japanese? "I would pronounce あおい as a two syllable "ow-ii" (something like that, not sure how to spell phonetics). Japanese speakers would not understand me." What are they expecting instead then? |
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Oct 11 |
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壱, 弐, 参 vs 一, 二, 三 The explanation: "These numbers are provided in lieu of regular kanji numbers for use in contexts where accuracy and avoiding fraud are critical such as in finance and legal agreements. In handwritten documents, for example, it would be easy for a forger to add a line above or below a numeral 一 to make 二, changing, say, 一万円 (10,000 yen) to 二万円 (20,000 yen); the alternate numbers prevent such alterations." seems to be contradicted by the existence of "(As 卅, but with one more extra vertical line) 40". o_O |
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Oct 5 |
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What romanization scheme is used by programmers? I can't imagine how a word can imitate the visual appearance of something, so... maybe it's a cultural thing? |
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Oct 4 |
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What romanization scheme is used by programmers? "imitatives"? Like onomatopoeia or something? |
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Oct 4 |
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What romanization scheme is used by programmers? What are the literal meanings of the Japanese metasyntactic variables btw? Or are they as meaningless as the English ones? :) |
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Sep 30 |
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What is the harshness of についてとやかく言う? I think this gets back into the "does Japanese really have curse words" debate... |
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Sep 30 |
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Why is the honorific o used for the bathroom? I don't understand what you mean about stabilization. I guess this is because I am accustomed to a language (English) where people often use nouns as verbs and vice-versa (and also either as adjectives in some cases) with quite little thought given to the matter. |
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Sep 25 |
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Is this the denial of a statement, or a statement of denial? @Dave it's more that it's a strange thing to end up having to deny. |
