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For the sake of consistency, can we please stick to just one of these terms throughout the article? It's okay to have a parenthetical mention such as, "Also called X," but after that we should be consistent in our usage and not flip-flop between the two terms. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 61.120.205.101 ( talk) 23:52, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
From the article:
Grammatical cases in Japanese are marked by particles placed after the nouns. A distinctive feature of Japanese is the presence of two cases which are roughly equivalent to the nominative case in other languages: one representing the sentence topic, other representing the subject. The most important case markers are the following:
Although some authorities seem to describe particles in this way, personally I don't think it is helpful. I wouldn't call "noun + に" the "dative case" of a noun, any more than I would "to + noun" in English. Article Grammatical case says "Case is based fundamentally on changes to the noun to indicate the noun's role in the sentence. This is not how English works; instead, word order and prepositions are used to achieve this." I would say also "this is not how Japanese works". What do other people think? 109.145.59.124 ( talk) 20:56, 3 August 2017 (UTC)
What source says that Japanese doesn't have cases? I'm not aware of any. It's true that case inflection doesn't exist in Japanese, but the existence of case is universally acknowledged by linguists. Ga and wo are always referred to as case particles in both Japanese and English precisely because they denote case. For example, as Natsuko Tsujimura writes in An Introduction to Japanese Linguistics, "Japanese case particles resemble the case systems in other languages in that they mark the grammatical functions of accompanying nouns in a sentence, but they also exhibit a unique set of properties that are not commonly observed in other case systems." I could list hundreds of books on the uses of case in Japanese, but I don't know of any linguists who deny the existence of case in Japanese. What linguist denies that Japanese uses cases? Tikisim ( talk) 03:22, 20 November 2020 (UTC)
There is an example of a noun phrase for "black cat", given as 黒猫 (kuroneko). "Adjective" is essentially undefined w.r.t. Japanese, and you could argue that this is a compound noun rather than a noun phrase, but it is head-final, which is the point of the paragraph. An IP has repeatedly changed this to "黒い猫" (kuroi neko), which would not be wrong (kuroi is the "true adjective" form) but glossing it kuro no neko which demonstrates a failure to know hiragana. Imaginatorium ( talk) 03:48, 31 July 2018 (UTC)
I suppose that the IP is aiming at a Japanese version of the English examples above this. But the first two of these English examples are screwy -- or anyway they are for me, who hasn't read anything by Greenberg. Here they are, after markup-stripping:
I'm unfamiliar with the concept of "genitive phrase"; I don't see any of what I'd call modification; and at least one in each of these pairs is not a noun but instead a noun phrase.
These aren't nouns; they're noun phrases. And I'm puzzled by "governed by"; rather, I'd say they're complements. I'll skip the third; so the fourth one is:
Well, the most straightforward example, for expository purposes, of this in Japanese would be 黒い猫, I suppose. Which is commoner, that or 黒猫? The answer is perhaps complicated by the 宅急便 trademark. But I note that Google shows 赤パンツ (in quotation marks) as about half as common again as 赤いパンツ (in quotation marks). -- Hoary ( talk) 04:52, 31 July 2018 (UTC)
[ADJ]
+ [NOUN]
.[NOUN]
+ [NOUN]
.[NOUN]
as a compound noun, while things that are less commonly black will take the adjectival phrase form as kuroi [NOUN]
." "Japanese is a synthetic language [...] with both productive and fixed elements..." "
Does anyone know what "productive and fixed elements" is referring to? After a cursory search through the references and a few linguistics resources online, I can't find any usage of these terms. Are they commonly accepted in the field? The closest I could find is Productivity (linguistics), but I'm not sure how the phrase "productive elements" arises from this definition.
In general, I feel that this article's lead section is too filled with jargon to be useful to anyone outside the field of linguistics. In comparison, the leads on Spanish grammar and English grammar are much more informative. I plan to rewrite this lead accordingly; let me know if any changes are too drastic. — Shitakunai ( talk) 02:18, 16 August 2019 (UTC)
I know this matter doesn't have to do with Japanese grammar, but I think it could use clearer terminology:
"The conjugation of i-adjectives has similarities to the conjugation of verbs, unlike Western languages where inflection of adjectives, where it exists, is more likely to have similarities to the declension of nouns. Verbs and adjectives being closely related is unusual from the perspective of English, but is a common case across languages generally, and one may consider Japanese adjectives as a kind of stative verb."
By "Western", does that paragraph technically mean Indo-European? Uralic languages like Hungarian and Finnish, which aren't Indo-European, can be considered "Western", but that doesn't necessarily mean that they have similarities aside from loanwords spread via geographic proximity. It gets even more ambiguous since Turkic or Afro-Asiatic (such as Semitic) languages would definitely be considered Western from a Japanese perspective, but aren't really considered Western in the usual sense.
ThighFish ( talk) 04:09, 20 April 2021 (UTC)
@ Ineffablebookkeeper: your edit on 2021-12-28 entirely removed the module "nihongo krt" from the article, with the following comment:
However, to say that 'a different order of words is the same thing' is to ignore that there may be deliberate choices in word order that improve the experience for the reader. That is exactly what the difference between nihongo3 and nihongo krt is supposed to achieve. nihongo shows English first; nihongo3 shows romaji first; nihongo krt shows kanji/kana first. So in your edit, by replacing all nihongo krt with nihongo3, you are redirecting the focus in every context away from the original Japanese script toward the romanised transliteration. I'm not sure that is the best way for every context, especially on articles that explicitly describe or explain Japanese language. Perhaps, from a stylistic point-of-view, the article could take an entirely "romaji-first" approach; however you must check each and every replaced occurrence where you've changed the word order from "krt" (kanji-romaji-transliteration) to "tkr" (transliteration-kanji-romaji) to make sure that you haven't introduced confusion where it wouldn't have existed otherwise. If you have introduced confusion from the change of word order, then you can either revert the change or re-word the context to eliminate the confusion.
Secondly, there are currently 39 transclusions of nihongo krt, within less than 1 year of its introduction on Wikipedia. That's not bad, and I wouldn't say that it's grounds for removal (or discussion to be removed). But it serves a very strong purpose, mainly on the Japanese verb conjugation page (where it's transcluded 536 times). In that article, the kana is essential to notice the patterns within the context of conjugation. However, discussing the future of nihongo krt is best done on it's talk page, not here (or in the comments of edits on this page either).
But back to the main point: Did you verify if the change of word order (from krt to tkr) was the best choice for each instance in the article? — JKVeganAbroad ( talk) 17:12, 8 January 2022 (UTC)
This section seems to require, for any kind of understanding, knowledge that is not to be found anywhere on this page. Could it perhaps be moved to the Japanese adjectives article, for example? Or else, could extra information about these adjectives be included in this page, to make that section meaningful? Or perhaps both? W. P. Uzer ( talk) 21:38, 13 January 2022 (UTC)
Many (but not all) of the example sentences in the "Particles" section have capitalized words in the romanization, apparently reflecting the fact that those words are written in katakana (which seems to me irrelevant to the topic of that section). Is this standard? necessary? W. P. Uzer ( talk) 07:12, 16 June 2022 (UTC)
![]() | Japanese grammar was one of the Language and literature good articles, but it has been removed from the list. There are suggestions below for improving the article to meet the good article criteria. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake. | |||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||
Current status: Delisted good article |
![]() | This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
||||
For the sake of consistency, can we please stick to just one of these terms throughout the article? It's okay to have a parenthetical mention such as, "Also called X," but after that we should be consistent in our usage and not flip-flop between the two terms. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 61.120.205.101 ( talk) 23:52, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
From the article:
Grammatical cases in Japanese are marked by particles placed after the nouns. A distinctive feature of Japanese is the presence of two cases which are roughly equivalent to the nominative case in other languages: one representing the sentence topic, other representing the subject. The most important case markers are the following:
Although some authorities seem to describe particles in this way, personally I don't think it is helpful. I wouldn't call "noun + に" the "dative case" of a noun, any more than I would "to + noun" in English. Article Grammatical case says "Case is based fundamentally on changes to the noun to indicate the noun's role in the sentence. This is not how English works; instead, word order and prepositions are used to achieve this." I would say also "this is not how Japanese works". What do other people think? 109.145.59.124 ( talk) 20:56, 3 August 2017 (UTC)
What source says that Japanese doesn't have cases? I'm not aware of any. It's true that case inflection doesn't exist in Japanese, but the existence of case is universally acknowledged by linguists. Ga and wo are always referred to as case particles in both Japanese and English precisely because they denote case. For example, as Natsuko Tsujimura writes in An Introduction to Japanese Linguistics, "Japanese case particles resemble the case systems in other languages in that they mark the grammatical functions of accompanying nouns in a sentence, but they also exhibit a unique set of properties that are not commonly observed in other case systems." I could list hundreds of books on the uses of case in Japanese, but I don't know of any linguists who deny the existence of case in Japanese. What linguist denies that Japanese uses cases? Tikisim ( talk) 03:22, 20 November 2020 (UTC)
There is an example of a noun phrase for "black cat", given as 黒猫 (kuroneko). "Adjective" is essentially undefined w.r.t. Japanese, and you could argue that this is a compound noun rather than a noun phrase, but it is head-final, which is the point of the paragraph. An IP has repeatedly changed this to "黒い猫" (kuroi neko), which would not be wrong (kuroi is the "true adjective" form) but glossing it kuro no neko which demonstrates a failure to know hiragana. Imaginatorium ( talk) 03:48, 31 July 2018 (UTC)
I suppose that the IP is aiming at a Japanese version of the English examples above this. But the first two of these English examples are screwy -- or anyway they are for me, who hasn't read anything by Greenberg. Here they are, after markup-stripping:
I'm unfamiliar with the concept of "genitive phrase"; I don't see any of what I'd call modification; and at least one in each of these pairs is not a noun but instead a noun phrase.
These aren't nouns; they're noun phrases. And I'm puzzled by "governed by"; rather, I'd say they're complements. I'll skip the third; so the fourth one is:
Well, the most straightforward example, for expository purposes, of this in Japanese would be 黒い猫, I suppose. Which is commoner, that or 黒猫? The answer is perhaps complicated by the 宅急便 trademark. But I note that Google shows 赤パンツ (in quotation marks) as about half as common again as 赤いパンツ (in quotation marks). -- Hoary ( talk) 04:52, 31 July 2018 (UTC)
[ADJ]
+ [NOUN]
.[NOUN]
+ [NOUN]
.[NOUN]
as a compound noun, while things that are less commonly black will take the adjectival phrase form as kuroi [NOUN]
." "Japanese is a synthetic language [...] with both productive and fixed elements..." "
Does anyone know what "productive and fixed elements" is referring to? After a cursory search through the references and a few linguistics resources online, I can't find any usage of these terms. Are they commonly accepted in the field? The closest I could find is Productivity (linguistics), but I'm not sure how the phrase "productive elements" arises from this definition.
In general, I feel that this article's lead section is too filled with jargon to be useful to anyone outside the field of linguistics. In comparison, the leads on Spanish grammar and English grammar are much more informative. I plan to rewrite this lead accordingly; let me know if any changes are too drastic. — Shitakunai ( talk) 02:18, 16 August 2019 (UTC)
I know this matter doesn't have to do with Japanese grammar, but I think it could use clearer terminology:
"The conjugation of i-adjectives has similarities to the conjugation of verbs, unlike Western languages where inflection of adjectives, where it exists, is more likely to have similarities to the declension of nouns. Verbs and adjectives being closely related is unusual from the perspective of English, but is a common case across languages generally, and one may consider Japanese adjectives as a kind of stative verb."
By "Western", does that paragraph technically mean Indo-European? Uralic languages like Hungarian and Finnish, which aren't Indo-European, can be considered "Western", but that doesn't necessarily mean that they have similarities aside from loanwords spread via geographic proximity. It gets even more ambiguous since Turkic or Afro-Asiatic (such as Semitic) languages would definitely be considered Western from a Japanese perspective, but aren't really considered Western in the usual sense.
ThighFish ( talk) 04:09, 20 April 2021 (UTC)
@ Ineffablebookkeeper: your edit on 2021-12-28 entirely removed the module "nihongo krt" from the article, with the following comment:
However, to say that 'a different order of words is the same thing' is to ignore that there may be deliberate choices in word order that improve the experience for the reader. That is exactly what the difference between nihongo3 and nihongo krt is supposed to achieve. nihongo shows English first; nihongo3 shows romaji first; nihongo krt shows kanji/kana first. So in your edit, by replacing all nihongo krt with nihongo3, you are redirecting the focus in every context away from the original Japanese script toward the romanised transliteration. I'm not sure that is the best way for every context, especially on articles that explicitly describe or explain Japanese language. Perhaps, from a stylistic point-of-view, the article could take an entirely "romaji-first" approach; however you must check each and every replaced occurrence where you've changed the word order from "krt" (kanji-romaji-transliteration) to "tkr" (transliteration-kanji-romaji) to make sure that you haven't introduced confusion where it wouldn't have existed otherwise. If you have introduced confusion from the change of word order, then you can either revert the change or re-word the context to eliminate the confusion.
Secondly, there are currently 39 transclusions of nihongo krt, within less than 1 year of its introduction on Wikipedia. That's not bad, and I wouldn't say that it's grounds for removal (or discussion to be removed). But it serves a very strong purpose, mainly on the Japanese verb conjugation page (where it's transcluded 536 times). In that article, the kana is essential to notice the patterns within the context of conjugation. However, discussing the future of nihongo krt is best done on it's talk page, not here (or in the comments of edits on this page either).
But back to the main point: Did you verify if the change of word order (from krt to tkr) was the best choice for each instance in the article? — JKVeganAbroad ( talk) 17:12, 8 January 2022 (UTC)
This section seems to require, for any kind of understanding, knowledge that is not to be found anywhere on this page. Could it perhaps be moved to the Japanese adjectives article, for example? Or else, could extra information about these adjectives be included in this page, to make that section meaningful? Or perhaps both? W. P. Uzer ( talk) 21:38, 13 January 2022 (UTC)
Many (but not all) of the example sentences in the "Particles" section have capitalized words in the romanization, apparently reflecting the fact that those words are written in katakana (which seems to me irrelevant to the topic of that section). Is this standard? necessary? W. P. Uzer ( talk) 07:12, 16 June 2022 (UTC)