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I am removing all the inappropriate links from here. I recently did the same thing on the kanji page, and put them on a new page learning kanji. Some people objected to this new page as it was inappropriate for Wikipedia. I agree with the objection to the "learning kanji" page, and in the light of that discussion here I have just removed all the spam and irrelevant links. -- DannyWilde 00:12, 5 September 2005 (UTC)
I am removing the "arigato comes from Portuguese obligato" line. This has been debunked a million times. I am a near-native Japanese speaker who has lived in the country over eight years.--The Fay.
The statement "In Japanese, a stressed syllable is merely pronounced at a higher pitch" is wrong. Japanese pitch accents are manifested as steep *drops* in pitch. Someone needs to explain the Japanese pitch accent system. Maybe I'll do it myself one of these days when I can find the time...
I think it would be a good idea to include Japanese phonemes here - although of c. not all scholars agree on whether say /S/ (as in Japanese shakuhachi) is actually a phoneme...but the number of phonemes etc. is controversial in most languages... http://pub3.ezboard.com/fhumanjapanesejapanesegrammar.showMessage?topicID=509.topic Wathiik----
I saw your posting and I tend agree with the other guy, Shibatani. So you see there are problems already. I assume he posited the /Q/ because these "double consonants" are proceeded by a very brief glottal stop. Or, maybe he is stuck to the writing system, where the double consonants are written tsu+C? However, if you want to post your analysis, I would link it to this page, which is really not a linguistic analysis.
[I thought that some info on the history of the language and writing system would be useful, but didn't know where it fit. Other things I would add - A quick note on 'small tsu' stopping, a intro to counters, and a mention of additional blending options in Katakana (vowels and also the newer 'v blends'). Just some ideas.]
Are there similar words with Turkish? Like "teppen" and "tepe"? Aknxy 15:55, Apr 6, 2005 (UTC)
Sorry. Had to be more precise. I mean words having same or similar meaning and same or similar pronounciation. "Teppen" seems to be one of them. According to dictionary it means: top, summit in Japanese. "Tepe" on the other hand has exactly the same meaning in Turkish. My Japanese teacher was saying that there are some 300 or so similar words like that. I don't know any other examples. But my Japanese is not good. Is this information true? Is it possible? Aknxy 21:55, Apr 21, 2005 (UTC)
Removed the references to Estonian and Finnish from the text, because it may be confused such that those are Altaic languages. The "Ural-Altaic family" is merely a suggestion; even though Uralic and Altaic languages have influenced each other, the consensus is that no common origin has been demonstrated. -- Vuo 02:48, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Japanese is usually classified as an Altaic language. I think there is some scholarly debate about classification of languages re Japanese, but it's usually found under "Altaic" in most family trees. I'm not sure how to effect a change of this? Will find out
Japanese has no proven relation to Altaic languages. Some scholars think it might have such relation but general concensus is that nothing has been proven so far. -- User:Taw
What a awful English-centrism. Sentences need no subject is majority of Indo-European languages. English is weird because they do need subject. Just look at: Latin, Italian, Polish, Russian, any other Slavic language (and many more). -- User:Taw
First, "grammatical subject" and "information about subject" are two different things. Most languages don't require first, but usually have some form of second (verb ending, politeness level etc.).
Second, there are sentences which genuinely have no semantic subject, but need grammatical subject in English, like:
There are many other such constructs in Polish, in both colloquial and polite language.
Third, Latin also doesn't need subject, only information about subject. -- User:Taw
Check http://pl.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?J%EAzyk_japo%F1ski and all related pages on Polish Wikipedia. There is really lot of stuff there. -- User:Taw
According to sci.lang.japanese faq, Kunrei standard says that Hepburn-written words in Kunrei text are "only to be used for words with strong international connotations, those that are customarily romanised that way or if it strongly improves the information content". I think that "Romaji" and "Kanji" are such words, but don't have strong feelings about that. I prefer kana anyway. -- User:Taw
Tomasz, I like kana for two reasons:
1) They are cute.
2) When putting up karaoke lyrics for an international group to sing along with, would you not prefer kana? There are so many romaji systems.
I fixed some formatting in the conversation examples. -- Ed Poor
This needs to be checked for accuracy before posting:
Sometimes, a word in Japanese both looks and sounds like a word in Chinese. Examples:
Pronunciation (in SAMPA) | ||||
Word | Meaning | Japanese | Chinese | Korean |
愛 | love | /ai/ | /ai/ | /{/ |
存在 | existence | /sonzai/ | /sondzai/Is this right? | /dZondZ{/ |
This is because of borrowing of words from Chinese into Japanese.
However, not all words which were borrowed in this way are alike in today's speech. There may even be false friends. An interesting case is that of the Japanese numeral for ten (/dZu:/), because it sounds like the Chinese numeral for nine (/dZju/ is this right?). (The Japanese numeral for nine is /kju:/.)
ten in Korean /Sip/, nine in Korean between /ku:/ and /gu:/. --Kein Linguist
Examples from Korean, etc., would be good as well. I think they exist.
The article looks like still a language guide for English-speakers. While it is not completely wrong, it might mislead people. I don't think for example, Romaji is such a big topic in Japanese language because the Japanese hardly use it in their everyday life. So I will or did already:
Or you can help me out to do this if you happen to know something about Japanese language. Cheers! -- Taku 13:32 May 14, 2003 (UTC)
The language is heavily tied to Japanese culture and vice-versa
-- Well, all languages are tied to their respective cultures. Japanese happens to be tied to only one culture (taking as granted that there is only one culture in Japan). Isn't it so? Marco Neves 03:21, 11 Aug 2003 (UTC)Marco Neves
I made a major edit, changing the following:
Things we should still do:
MattH 05:31, 22 Aug 2003 (UTC)
I made another edit. I
MattH 07:08, 28 Aug 2003 (UTC)
I think there's a mistake in this paragraph, but I don't want to change it because I'm not certain:
I don't think that right-to-left horizontal writing is ever used today. What appears to be right-to-left horizontal writing can be explained as vertical writing in which each column contains only one character. (This theory would be falsified by the existence of a passage written right-to-left which spans more than one line.)
I've never heard of its being used historically either, but that could easily be ignorance on my part.
-- BenRG
RTL horizontal writing is still used. Some examples include the engraved characters on some monuments as well as old-style banners and signs. It is rare but occasionally encountered, so deserves a mention.
Brion -- vertical (top to bottom, right to left) and horizontal (just like English) writing styles are both in common use. I tried to edit that section to make it clearer.
With regard to the section on politeness and "language levels": my impression (I've studied Japanese for nine years but am not fluent) is that there are two independent kinds of politeness level, not just one as the section currently suggests. One kind depends on who you're talking to, and has only two levels, da and desu/masu (which correspond to the tu and vu of European languages). The other depends on who you're talking about (in relation both to you and to the person you're talking to), and it has at least four levels: ordinary, honorific, humble, and contemptuous (yagaru). The two can appear in almost any combination; e.g. for iku the eight possible combos are iku, ikimasu, irassharu, irasshaimasu, mairu, mairimasu, ikiyagaru, and ikiyagarimasu. Of these only the last seems implausible to me, and only because I can't think of any social situation in which it would be appropriate to use it. It's not ruled out grammatically, though.
Does this sound right/wrong to anyone? Should I edit the politeness section to reflect it?
-- BenRG
Teineigo/Keigo is a thorny issue all around, and there are lots of theories on how best to present it to an English speaker. BenRG is right that, as an example, I may be talking informally to a good friend about my teacher, and whenever I mention the teacher I do so respectfully. However, I may also use keigo with the person I am speaking with. Japanese doctors often speak to their patients using keigo. So it does not seem to merely be a question of speech to or about. All the forms may be used with anyone at any time, depending on the circumstances.
I think the best way to present it is with the Japanese concepts. Clearly there are two basic speaking styles: kudaketa (da, verbs ending in -ru, etc.) and teineigo (desu/masu). But this is, of course, something of a simplification, because a good friend may say something like gambarimasu! to his best friend, and the -masu merely adds connotations of seriousness and sincerity. Nonetheless, this dichotomy seems like the best way to present basic formality/informality.
Then there would also need to be a discussion on the particulars of standard, humble, honorific, and even contemptuous speaking styles. Most of this seems to be currently included, but there is always room for more.
While I'm thinking about it, there should probably also be a mention of the differing styles of written Japanese (de aru vs. da vs. nothing at all, etc.).
-- MattH 05:20, 15 Sep 2003 (UTC)
I guess what I'm wondering is: is there any situation in which an honorific verb is used, but the person being honored is not the (explicit or implicit) grammatical subject of the verb?
You mentioned that doctors use keigo when speaking with patients. I would expect this in cases where the patient is also the subject of the sentence, which s/he would be most of the time because people go to doctors to be told things about themselves (or their body parts at any rate).
I found this message (on the Teach Yourself Japanese Message Board) which argues for the to/about idea: http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/~ts/japanese/message/message.cgi?sjis;file=jpnDQjvT55HDQjA4nAm.html
The response from TAKASUGI Shinji is also interesting: http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/~ts/japanese/message/message.cgi?sjis;file=jpnDQkqngdLDQjvT55H.html
-- BenRG 05:31, 17 Sep 2003 (UTC)
"Humble language is used to talk about oneself to one's own group." This sentence is slightly misleading. The purpose of humble language is to elevate the person you are interacting with in the sentence you use it. You aren't really making yourself humble, per se.
Also, what is the difference that is usually made between /wo/ and /o/? Occasionally I hear Japanese people say /wo/ like wo. But most of the time /wo/ sounds exactly like /o/ to my ears.
About the pronunciation I'm really no expert, but I think that Japanese language has lots of subtle variations that happen mainly because in some cases a particular pronunciation is easier to comply phonetically. The fun/pun case when telling time is about the first one a Japanese student will learn, and info it's 100% based on phonetics. Of course there are other cases such as "shyo ga nai" turning into >"sho ga nai", etc.
On the other hand, sometimes there are subtle differences that somehow seem aimed to leave no chance to misunderstandings. That happens often with wo, for example:
"nani wo yatteimasu ka" would almost certainly be pronounced as /o/, while something like "ki ga jukusu nowo matsu" it's pronounced as /wo/. A clear example I can think of is "itta no?" being pronounced as "yutta no?" in order to prevent a misunderstanding between iu and iku.
Someone please correct me, I’m far from being the fittest for this, but I wanted this to be explained here ;)
About ha which is pronounced as wa when used as particle: Yes, that's true but that doesn't mean it should be written as ha in Romaji. In my experience, and I just looked in 3 books and 2 dictionaries that use Romaji, the most common practice is to write it as wa. I propose that our article adopts this convention too. So instead of saying ha and explaining "pronounce it wa", we should write wa and explain "which is actually ha". -- 130.158.65.240 03:16, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
This seems to me to be an excellent article - I'm learning Japanese and there are a number of things which are explained better here than in my textbooks. So thanks to everyone who's worked on it.
I'd be inclined, though, to agree with 130.158.65.240 above, that "ha which is pronounced as wa when used as a particle" seems confusing. Surely the transliteration to romaji means that it should be written (in Romaji) the way that it sounds.
Also, standard practise in the textbooks is to write it (in romaji) as wa. So I've changed the text to "Kochira is the topic of the sentence, indicated by the particle wa (which is written as ha when used as a particle)."
I'm new to the Wikipedia, so if this change is wrong, I'm sure I can rely on someone to change it back. Thanks again for the excellent article.
-- AndyE
This sentence is misleading: "In Japanese, all syllables, with a few exceptions, are pronounced with equal length and loudness." Of course long syllables are pronounced longer than short syllables. I guess the intended meaning is that the length of a syllable is not varied in order to create stress, but that is not what the sentence says at the moment. -- Zero 23:38, 4 Apr 2004 (UTC)
I added Rendaku to the See Also list. If anyone thinks it's inappropriate, feel free to change it.
-- Nekokaze
This section seems like myth or nonsense to me. Inter-generational communication impossible in Japanese? 100 core words change every year? 20,000 words needed to read a newspaper? Where do these bizarre ideas come from?
Please provide references or rewrite. User:Gdr 2004 Jul 3
But those are not "intrinsic" difficulties. They may not even be difficulties for many learners. Native Chinese and Korean speakers already know kanji. Many languages have varying levels of politeness that rival those found in Japanese. Exploding Boy 07:56, Jul 5, 2004 (UTC)
Yeah, I know. I'm agreeing with you, too. Exploding Boy 15:08, Jul 5, 2004 (UTC)
OK, we didn't get any justification for this section. So I cut it. Gdr 22:17, 2004 Jul 7 (UTC)
This section considers the claims made and why I think some of them are misleading. Gdr 15:53, 2004 Jul 13 (UTC)
I read with interest this section and the resulting debate, and while there is a kernel of truth to some of the claims made, the whole section is fundamentally problematic because it makes a fundamental assumption that mainstream linguistics rejects; that one language can be objectively and measurably more or less X than some other language, where X is one of difficult, complicated, easy to learn, logical, descriptive etc. It is true that certain aspects of a language can make it easier or harder to learn for speakers of certain other languages, but no language is universally harder or easier than some other language. Certainly Kanji and politeness levels make Japanese harder to learn for English speakers than another Indo-European language, but the claim that core Japanese vocabulary is an order of magnitude larger than English's is frankly laughable.
Secondly, the argument about rate of language change is based on flawed analysis of the data. Saying that edition 2 from year 1991 had X words and edition 3 from year 2001 had X+1000 words; therefore Japanese adds 100 words per year on average is not a reasonable conclusion. How many words that are in a dictionary is much less a function of a size of a language than it is a function of the editorial policies of the dictionary makers. But even disregarding this flawed method of measuring language change, by way of comparison, the Oxford English Dictionary releases a list of 50-100 new English words every quarter. That's 200-400 new words a year, which is larger than your measure of Japanese language change, but as GDR pointed out, the majority of new words in a language aren't core vocabulary but are words at the fringes of language, used only in special areas. Further, the evidence I've read is that the majority of new words in Japanese are English borrowings anyway.
I have more to say about the claims of the size of the 95% core vocabulary, but I have to think more about it.
Nohat 01:51, 14 Jul 2004 (UTC)
As to the claim,
I have to say that the foremost problem with it is that it is unclear what it means exactly. First, I have to assume "read and understand over 95% of articles" means "read and understand over 95% of the words in articles", meaning that having a knowledge of the "core vocabulary" of a language would mean that if you were to read a newspaper, you would recognize and understand 95% of the total words, not unique words. Is this what is meant? It isn't clear. I would like to see a cross-linguistic comparative study that shows that this "95% core vocabulary" is significantly larger for Japanese than for other languages. I would be very surprised to see if that were true. But even if it were true, is this really a measure of the size of the core vocabulary, or is it a measure of the relative difficulty of writing of newspapers between Japanese and other languages. It may be simply a cultural idiosyncrasy that newspapers are written in an especially difficult-to-understand style with baroque vocabulary. In this case, the "95% core vocabulary" measure using newspapers isn't really a measure of the language itself, but a measure of the style used by newspaper article writers.
Nohat 02:06, 14 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Now hold on just a minute. First, let me say, Nohat: excellent post. Regarding this whole business with kanji, 1945 characters are designated for "daily use." These are the kanji a Japanese person must have mastered upon completion of high school. Any written work containing characters not on this list must print them with a phonetic guide. Roman characters are not very often used in newspapers, but in any case that would hardly be an obstacle to English speakers.
Giving estimates of numbers of words is always an iffy business. What qualifies as a word? Some people say the English language has more words than any other (somewhere in the region of 2 million by some counts). But what does that mean in practical terms?
Back to kanji, simply knowing 2000-odd individual kanji is not nearly enough for literacy. Some kanji compounds are intuitive (before and day means the other day, for example), but many are not: "each other" plus "kill" does not mean "to kill each other." It actually has nothing to do with killing at all.
Anyway, I have to agree with Nohat on this one: no language is universally harder or easier than some other language. Exploding Boy 10:29, Jul 15, 2004 (UTC)
Are there any examples of these? I was under the impression that Japanese words could have a coda consonant "n" or a long vowel, but not both. To the best of my knowledge this means a syllable can be either one mora ("short") or two ("long"). — Gwalla | Talk 05:44, 17 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I think a direct link to a list of honorific suffixes in the Politeness section would be nice. I don't know if such a list exists on WP. Although I found many mentions of these suffixes on different pages, I couldn't find an exhaustive list anywhere. I'd really like to see such a list, or at least one with the most used ones and their meaning/usage. --[[User:Gedeon| Ged ( talk) ( email)]] 23:23, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I've always been told that hiragana was created by women, based on a simplified version of Kanji. A quick search online elsewhere returned this information: (Taken from www.takase.com) During the end of the Nara period and during the Heian period, literary women (who were not allowed access to the male dominated Chinese learning) developed a syllabary that encompassed all 51 sounds of the Japanese language. This syllabary was based on the Sousho form of the Chinese characters and has a very feminine, flowing form. This style was originally called "onna-de" or "feminine-hand" and is now called "hiragana" and commonly called the cursive style of syllabary.
Obviously, the source is not unimpeachable, but it does mesh well with what I've heard elsewhere. Anyone know a good way to verify this one way or another?
-- Beska 16:03, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I've started a page on historical kana usage. Let the flames begin! adamrice
I'm not a linguist, and I've been taking for granted that Japanese has no diphthongs, however I found out yesterday when trying to explain the "OK" pronunciation to a Japanese that they DO know the concept (二重母音、nijyuuboin. loosely translated, double-weight vowel). As far as I know, Japanese consider things like hyo, byo, pyu, etc, etc. (basically anything that has a small ya/yu/yo) as diphthongs. After some thought, I think it makes sense, but I'm not a linguist. SpiceMan 22:06, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC)
I changed some of the nonsensical examples. I don't know how the rest of you pronounce it, but I pronounce "father" with more of an "aw" sound.
I suspect this is more about variations of English pronunciation (US vs UK) than about Japanese....but I think it is wrong to say that the vowel /o/ is like in HOPE. It is more like 90% of HOP and 10% of HOPE. Like these:
http://physics.uwyo.edu/~brent/jal/faq-6.wav
http://www.thejapanesepage.com/mp3/yoroshiku.mp3
http://www.japanese-online.com/language/kana3.wav
--
Zero 12:28, 24 Jan 2004 (UTC)
I don't remember where I read this, but I had read that the Japanese vowels /o/ and /e/ are pronounced [ɔ] and [ɛ], respectively, which also matches the vowels as I hear them. Can anyone else verify this?
Can anyone give an example of a Japanese word with a glottal stop? User: Fg2
Yes and no. Glottal stops may accompany geminates (i.e., double consonants) in some words (see below), but are entirely absent in the pronunciation of fricatives like /s/.
Meaning that, since, to take the first example, the word "school" is made up of two words, "gaku" and "ko," when they're put together the sound changes from gakuko to gaKKo (sounds like gak-ko). Exploding Boy 16:31, Jul 27, 2004 (UTC)
I'm not a linguist, but when I was taking Japanese classes we were told they were glottal stops. Exploding Boy 16:48, Jul 27, 2004 (UTC)
The characters you entered won't display on my computer, but if you're a linguist it should be easy enough to figure it out. What occurs is a doubling of a single consonant: itte (go) is pronounced it.te. Nippon is Nip.pon. Gakkou is gak.ko. Issen is is.sen. Exploding Boy 01:15, Jul 28, 2004 (UTC)
Still confused. I've read Glottal stop, and the link from there to Place of articulation, and gakkō sounds to me like a palatal stop: the tongue presses against the roof of the mouth to stop the flow of air. Or velar. I'm not sure where the boundaries within the mouth are. Itte seems alveolar, that is, the tongue presses against ridge behind the teeth. Issen seems not to be a stop, because the breath continues to flow. Ippon is labial, that is, the lips stop the air flow. I cannot think of a stop in Japanese that involves using the larynx to stop the air, as in the English uh-oh. Of course, I'm no linguist, so maybe I've misinterpreted those articles. Like OJ, I'll keep searching for the true glottal stop. Fg2 11:56, Nov 7, 2004 (UTC)
I'm with Fg2 on this. It seems pretty clear from Glottal stop that gakko, itte, ippon, issen etc. are not glottal stops. The true Japanese glottal stop only occurs at the end of some interjections, such as ita' (ouch!) and a' (ah!). These are written with a small tsu (っ or ッ) at the end of the word.
I am curious as to what source you are consulting for the phonetic & phonological description of geminate consonants. Can you list the reference(s)? I would like to see something where this was measured instrumentally. Here is a quote that you might find interesting from Akamatsu (1997:156):
Additionally, in footnote #442 Akamatsu (1997:334) states some other previous descriptions by Japanese phoneticians:
References:
Anway, this makes me want to investigate this further. Cheers! -- Ish ishwar 00:14, 2005 Jan 6 (UTC)
There is a glottal stop in Japanese(and it is mark orthograpgically with the small "tsu") but it defiently NOT found in the gemmination of voicless stops (p,t,k). The glottal stop found in Japanese is in few interjections like "ah", written 'a' + small 'tsu'. The glottal stop in Japanese isn't a very productive phone, as a matter of fact I don't even believe it is considered a phoneme at all. As far as in the "doubled" stops what simply is happening here is that there is an inaudible release of the stop followed an audible and unaspirated release. quite literally 2 stops. ex: [nip'pon], [gak'ko:]. The syllable structure of those to vords is /CVC CVN/ /CVC CV/ respectively. All this is clearly pointed out in the wikipidea article about the Japanese language. - Alejandro Canizales
Hi.
I found a study using fiberscope observation where the authors find that the glottis is open during geminate consonant production and furthermore, the glottis is open even wider for geminate consonants than for single consonants (Sawashima & Miyazaki 1973). That is somewhat surprising! So Akamatsu and others are quite correct.
Anyway, interesting stuff. Peace - Ish ishwar 09:02, 2005 Feb 7 (UTC)
The edit from "218.223.121.169" at 18:22, 3 Aug 2004 is "suspicious" and should (IMO) be partially reverted. It contains at least some legitimate rephrasing (I didn't check them all) but also removes many links and add a broken one. Could someone look into that? I don't have time right now myself... --[[User:Gedeon| Ged ( talk)]] 14:08, 7 Aug 2004 (UTC)
We had an anonymous edit changing the section on Katakana from: "words and names from foreign languages" to "words and names from foreign languages other than Chinese and Korean".
However, from my experience in Japan, katakana are indeed used for modern loan words borrowed from Mandarin, Cantonese, and Korean, like:
Many of these are food words, but I believe it does show that loan words from almost any language, including some from Chinese and Korean, can be written in katakana. Modern loan words almost universally seem to be written using katakana. Of course, a huge portion of the Japanese lexicon comprises direct borrowings from Chinese languages and is written using kanji, but it's not a hard-and-fast rule that katakana is never used to write Mandarin, Cantonese, and Korean loanwords.
-- Che Fox 16:39, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)
How has Japanese changed over the past centuries? That is, what differences are there between modern Japanese and archaic Japanese. What are the present tendencies in the language? 213.226.138.241 13:38, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)
This description of Japanese syllables (that I found in the "Sounds" section) is overly complex, totally euro-centred, and is likely unrecognizable to any Japanese speaker:
I have moved it here and substituted a description from a Japanese moraic point of view which is obviously simpler (though I'm open to correction). Breaking syllables in the middle of a geminate consonant, while it's obvious to English-speakers, would not make sense at all to a Japanese speaker. It just complicates the language in a way that can't be described with the Kana at all. At the moment I've removed the first description. My real point of doubt is whether the first description has value and should be in the article, or should just be left out.
Steverapaport 14:13, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)
P.S. If in fact, western linguists insist on describing moraic languages in syllabic terms, then the description above should be included, but prefaced with something like "From a Western point of view, "...
Hi.
I think that the majority of Japanese linguists of both Japanese and non-Japanese descent consider the mora to be needed in a description of Japanese phonology. A brief look over the literature will show this, I believe (I provided some of references at the bottom of the article). The very first modern linguist that worked on Japanese was Bernard Bloch (1950). He operated with the concept of mora although he used the term "syllable" due to the widespread use of this term in the non-linguistic literature, i.e. traditional European grammar literature (Bloch's "syllable" = "mora"—he mentions this in his phonemics article).
There is debate of whether Japanese needs to be described with syllables or not. Some linguists claim that the notion of syllable is irrelevant to Japanese. Other linguists claim that if the notions of both mora and syllable are used, then a greater degree of generalization can be achieved and it also will account for some exceptions under the mora-only descriptions (this mostly involves explaining the different pitch patterns). Linguists in this camp call Japanese a "mora-counting, syllable language" (McCawley 1978). This issue is still up in the air. So to state briefly, the literature emphasizes the mora and downplays the syllable, which may or may not be needed.
In addition to mora & syllable, other Japanese linguists operate with the notion of foot.
Another thing to note is that a mora could be used as a phonetic unit or a phonological unit or both.
A mora is called haku 拍 in Japanese. I don’t know much about the traditional Japanese analysis. I think that haku is basically something like a mora (but someone should check this out). Even if they are very similar, they both are defined within different theoretical systems. Somewhat off topic: I think I remember reading somewhere that the moraic nasal was not always indicated with a separate symbol (need to check this out, though)—maybe Japanese was not always mora-timed.
There is a very nice summary of this topic in an article by Haruo Kubozono in Tsujimura (1999). Peace. - Ish ishwar 00:41, 2005 Feb 7 (UTC)
If you want to describe the phonotactics succinctly, I think you could list these possible combinations:
So, even more compact:
- Ish ishwar 06:38, 2005 Feb 7 (UTC)
So what made it Euro-centric? The fact that the analysis was free of the restraints necessarily imposed by kana? As Ish mentioned, many scholars think that both "mora" and "syllable" are essential to describe Japanese adequately; read the literature and you'll see that. (Quick examples: long vs. short vowels & consonants requires moras, but accent in verbs requires syllables.)
As I read it, the description of syllables that Steverapaport objected to was trying to be all-inclusive, to describe syllables of both single moras and those of more than one mora. That it did not refer to kana is a good thing, IMHO. However, this all seems moot now, as the current article is brief to the point of terseness--and is better for it. Squidley 23:51, 14 November 2005 (UTC)
I added a recording of me saying "日本語". Lemme know if it's subpar. - karmosin 07:13, Mar 8, 2005 (UTC)
The article states that "[t]here are three types of words that correspond to adjectives in English: stative verbs (also called i-adjectives), copular nouns (na-adjectives), and the limited set of true adjectives in Japanese." While it's fashionable among linguists to call Japanese i-adjectives stative verbs, I don't believe that this view is at all accurate. About the only verb like behavior they exhibit is inflecting for tense; they still need an actual verb to form a complete predicate (*ringo-wa akai is not a complete sentence).
The only reason I'm posting this issue on the talk page rather than just changing the article is that, before I edit, I would like to have some clarification on what these mysterious "true adjectives" are -- they're not i-adjectives, and they're certainly not na-adjectives, so I'm really not sure what class of words is being referred to here. -- Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) 14:33, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Hear, hear. I've been working on Japanese since 1988, and working in Japanese off and on since 1998, and I must admit I'm befuddled as to what "true adjectives" are supposed to be. Anyone more knowledgeable than the two of us care to chime in with an answer?I would like to have some clarification on what these mysterious "true adjectives" are
if you dig back far enough, "-i"/"-shi" adjectives start looking like verbs
Kansai-ben is very close to the standard language, and varies essentially in slang; some consider it to be equivalent to the standard language
Does anyone besides me find this to be a pretty bizarre statement?
I could see a statement like the above applying to, say, the Yokohama dialect, but I'd have a hard time equating Kansai-ben with the "standard language."
CES 16:37, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I removed the entire paragraph, it seemed inaccurate and POV. CES 22:31, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I've seen Japanese katakana and kanji written left-to-right on pages, but I've also seen just kanji written top-to-bottom, with the columns right-to-left. I also notice that Japanese books are read back to front. Could information on this be included in the article? -- Poiuyt Man ( talk) 08:13, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I was looking for information about which dialects/regions formed the basis for modern Standard Japanese, but the article doesn't appear to cover that. -- Danny Yee 01:16, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Is it just me or is the "Learning Japanese" section short on actual information and long on POV? It seems like it needs to be cleaned up or deleted. CES 02:55, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)
What is the term for transcribing japanese to english, so that you can read it in english, but pronounce it as if you were reading it in japanese? Edit: and are there any online programs to do this? Babelfish just returns japanese characters.
Greetings. Would someone who can speak Japanese be kind enough to have a look over at the Reiki article? There seems to be a dispute over the actual meaning or meanings of the usage 霊気 reiki itself in Japanese. Also, there is no clear provenance as to whether the term is a recent coinage or a term from earlier Japanese history. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Regards, Fire Star 04:34, 3 May 2005 (UTC)
Would anyone strenuously object to moving the Sounds section to an independent article? The current article is 40kb, and the phonology section is sufficiently detailed to stand well-enough as an article of its own (IMHO). Tomer TALK 01:16, May 27, 2005 (UTC)
OK. I moved it. Anyone got any ideas for a mini-intro to put into the #Sounds section so it doesn't look quite so bare? Tomer TALK 13:05, May 29, 2005 (UTC)
Over at Teikyo University it says the university was originally called Teikyo Commercial High School (帝京商業高等学校; teikyo syogyo kōkō). Is that right? I can't read kanji, but it looks to me like there are too many kanji characters for that romaji transliteration. If it's wrong, could someone correct it at that page? Thanks! -- Angr/ tɔk tə mi 29 June 2005 23:38 (UTC)
This section of text is from the article.
"desu です is a contraction of de で" should this be changed to "desu です is a contraction of de gozaimasu で ございます"?
Markcox 6 July 2005 04:37 (UTC)
であります。is polite. でございます。is super polite(keigo).Like imasu and irasshaimasu. If you are a guest in a hotel, and the front desk needs to know your nationality, he would say: Amerika jin de gozaimas ka? If there is a Japanese you've casually met in a restaurant, he would say, Amerika jin des ka? A very young Japanese child hearing you speak English would ask , Amerika jin ka?(rude)
Japanese teachers seem to teach very theoretical/old/classical Japanese. I was taught that the polite form of cheap (yasui) and blue (aoi) was yasoo gozaimsu.(安そうございます。) and aoo gozaimasu(青おうございます。) But only a few very old Japanese know this. The rest tell me they don't know this. Who is right? To be on the safe side master the polite(textbook) form then learn the conversational Japanese. -- Jondel 00:52, 15 July 2005 (UTC)
It's not that they 'don't know' it ... the ~ou gozaimasu form is so rarely used and is not really a useful conjugation anymore. It exists only in a few traditional phrases like ohayou (from hayai) and arigatou, (from arigatai). Regular adjectives are not conjugated in this way. It might be in some way grammatically correct to say that the book is 'aoude gozaimasu', but laughter will result as you're using formal speech that hasn't been in common use for hundreds? of years. It IS good to know about the ~oude gozaimasu conjugation, or rather it may be interesting, if you're interested in the origin of some Japanese expressions, but it's about as useful as knowing that 'goodbye' comes from 'Good be with you' (or whatever the correct expression is).
---
About the -u form. It is actually the onbin 音便 form of "adverbs" or similar words.
the last one of which is due to the fact that the shi + u classical Japanese combination is pronounced shuu. This kind of onbin was prevalent in late-ish classical Japanese, which saw the so-called -te forms of verbs having an additional alternative onbin form in addition to the ones we are familiar with in modern Japanese, e.g. for omoo (思ふ; おもふ), omotte (おもつて) = omoote (おもうて) (standard form omoite おもひて); similarly koo (買ふ; かふ) => katte (かつて) = koote (かうて) = kaite (かひて). Note how we now say omou and write おもう instead of omoo, and kau / かう instead of koo too. As for the -u gozaimasu pattern, it is still very occasionally used. It is a very polite way of saying desu, e.g. うれしゅうございます = うれしいです. You can sort of link this to the fact that the negative is うれしくない, the positive would, if you invert the ない, be うれしくある (which would only be used if there is a reason to), now change うれしく to うれしゅう and ある to ございます. Fifty to a hundred years ago, this formation was quite a common thing. -- KittySaturn 08:57, September 2, 2005 (UTC)
As a side note of little significance, perhaps, but maybe interesting, the おはす mentioned above, owasu (not ohasu), was the only other suru (su) irregular verb besides suru (su), which can also mean aru (ari), which is why it is also considered a possible origin of desu, which died out, which (... etc.) so now we are left with suru. :-) Not only this, but owasu is the origin of the word gozaimasu. おはす (御座す) => read kanjis in on-yomi: ござ => add verb あり (= modern day ある) : ござあり => make it yodan type : ござある => shorten it : ござる => add ます : ござります => apply onbin : ございます. There are many steps to this final gozaimasu, and between each step there are many branches (e.g. the go came off, or, gozarimasu morphed into gozansu, etc. etc.), but only one form survived all these times. -- KittySaturn 09:05, September 2, 2005 (UTC)
Obviously this is not a comprehensive guide to pronounciation, but I feel the notes do not justly push the fact that Japanese simply isn't pronounced the way it looks (as Romaji). Particularly the over-simplified explanation of the pronounciation of the /o/ vowel mentioned above. Seems to be understood that the Roman spelling is merely representative and can't be relied on for accurate pronouncation (although pronouncing Japanese as it looks in English will probably render a speaker at least mostly intelligible to most Japanese) but while most basic Japanese langauge texts try to imply /wo/ changes to /o/ (as far as relative pronounciation) this simply isn't true in the most common dialects. /wo/ does undergo an audible change in MANY or MOST of Japanese speakers -- probably less predominantely in the younger generation [speculation here] -- but it is dependant on the surrounding sounds as opposed to the grammar function. For example; a fairly common name, Kaori, becomes rather uncommon when the character /wo/ is used instead of /o/. There is no change in pronounciation, even though it may be spelled Kawori. Also notable is how it sounds in music, especially when it is drawn out; the /wo/ style sound is much more pronounced. The basic reason for this is that the sound is formed in a slightly different part of the mouth (or a slightly different way) than it is in English. Thus the /wo/ sound often finds it's way into borrowed or commonly 'katakana-ized' words or phrases, for example 'carry on' which sounds like 'carry won' or 'carry uon' coming from the mouth of most non-English speaking Japanese. A very similar distinction is seen in the sounds for /n/ (for example, the pronounciation of yen vs. en), /zu/ and all the /z/ sounds (which sound more like /dzu/ etc.), and /fu/, which really isn't anything like the english /fu/ at all.
This is all very wordy and I don't believe it's exactly useful in this document, but I think it should be stressed that English romanizations for Japanese sounds are not extremely representative. At least then some people would stop argueing about which English character 'it' sounds like, knowing that it doesn't really matter at all. Gavin 2005 07 15
there's an error of translation near: "Nihon" (にほん) can mean "two books" (二本) as well as "Japan" (日本). 本 is the counter for long, thin cylidrical objects, not for books. komuta, 2005 07 21
Thank you for your suggestion! When you feel an article needs improvement, please feel free to make whatever changes you feel are needed. Wikipedia is a wiki, so anyone can edit almost any article by simply following the Edit this page link at the top. You don't even need to log in! (Although there are some reasons why you might like to…) The Wikipedia community encourages you to be bold. Don't worry too much about making honest mistakes—they're likely to be found and corrected quickly. If you're not sure how editing works, check out how to edit a page, or use the sandbox to try out your editing skills. New contributors are always welcome. — Gwalla | Talk 04:29, 24 July 2005 (UTC)
Concerning the latest tweaks to the lead, could someone tell me what linguists that actually claim that Chinese and Japanese are related? If it's only completely fringe scholars, I don't see the merit of stating that it's "largely accepted". Is this on the same level as Nostratic languages, or are there reasonable doubts accepted by a majority of scholars? Personally, I've never even heard crackpot claims of Chinese and Japanese being distantly related.
Peter Isotalo 18:36, 25 July 2005 (UTC)
It's even worse than Nostratic, since there are Nostratists who include Japanese as a candidate for nostratic, but not Chinese. Tomer TALK 22:35, July 25, 2005 (UTC)
I think it's likely that the majority of linguists discount a connection between Japanese and Chinese, a judgement that seems justified based on the fact that basic aspects of their grammar systems are completely different (SOV and SVO etc.) but many (normal) people would still argue that their is a connection, due to the similarity in sound of a large number of words. It may be that Japanese changed slightly to become more similar to Chinese more recently, but I'll leave it to the linguists to even give that much credit. freshgavin 20:32, 31 July 2005
There are a few hypothesized changes from Old Japanese through Classical Japanese which happened under the influence of Chinese. For instance, the introduction of the nasal syllabic n is probably due to a reduction of final mu syllables. This may have occurred because of the common nasal n ending many Chinese words. Note that until the kana spelling reform in the 20th century there was no sign clearly differentiating mu and n. There are a few others but they aren't at the top of my thoughts right now. Other changes certainly included grammatical changes from the introduction of vast numbers of lexical items. — Jéioosh 01:02, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
When are the hiragana ぢゃ (ja), ぢゅ (ju), and ぢょ (jo) used in place of じゃ ja, じゅ ju, and じょ jo? Hiragana doesn't explain. Guessing from how chi and tsu to ji and zu when used after chi and tsu or a kanji relevant to the meaning of a word, is it ぢゃ if ぢゃ comes after ちゃ?
I'm trying to learn Japanese, using hiragana as my first lesson. Toothpaste 11:24, 18 September 2005 (UTC)
Thank you. By the way, is こおこお-せい the correct hiragana for "kookoo-sei"? Is だいがく-せい the correct hiragana for "daigaku-sei"? Toothpaste 06:42, 19 September 2005 (UTC)
Or is it こうこうせい for high school? The former brings up more Google results. Looks like this romaji-hiragana converter was a little off. Or was "kookoo-sei" not the right romaji? "Koukou-sei" brings up more Google results, too. Toothpaste 08:48, 19 September 2005 (UTC)
Thank you very much. This link confused me with the spelling. By the way, how is "kootoogakkoo," according to that link, spelled in romaji and hiragana? Toothpaste 10:32, 19 September 2005 (UTC)
The grammar section of this article is becoming extremely long - much too long for a summary of the main article. I'd like to suggest shortening it very drastically to give the basics, and moving any non-duplicated contents from here into " Japanese grammar". If there are any objections, please state your case. -- DannyWilde 02:24, 20 September 2005 (UTC)
Further to the above comments, prior to actually doing the edits, here I have copied out the grammar section of the article, and written my comments in italics and suggestions for material to be moved elsewhere, simplified, or deleted, which are written like this. Please keep in mind that this section should be a summary of the main article
Japanese grammar when commenting - I am not suggesting removing this material from Wikipedia altogether, but from the grammar summary in the top page on the Japanese language. If anyone has any points to make, please let me know and I'll try to keep it in mind. --
DannyWilde
05:14, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
Certain aspects of Japanese grammar are highly controversial. Japanese grammar can be characterized by the following prominent features:
Remove all kanji/kana. They do absolutely nothing to illustrate Japanese grammar, and serve to make the section unreadable. Romaji is enough for the grammar section. -- DannyWilde 05:14, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
Kochira こちら is the topic of the sentence, indicated by the particle wa は (Note: ha は is pronounced wa when it is a "topic marker"); literally, it means "as for this direction," but here, it means "as for this person." The verb is desu です ("be"). As a phrase, Tanaka san desu 田中さんです is the comment. This sentence loosely translates to "As for this person, (it) is Mr./Mrs./Ms. Tanaka". So Japanese, like Chinese and Korean, is often called a topic-prominent language, which means it indicates the topic separately from the subject, and the two do not always coincide. For example, the sentence Zō wa hana ga nagai 象は 鼻が 長い literally means, "as for elephants, the nose is long." The topic is zō 象 "elephant," and the subject is hana 鼻 "nose."
Rationale: This duplicates Japanese grammar and it is not important enough to repeat in the summary.-- DannyWilde 05:14, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
Rationale: This material is not important enough for the summary. It can be summarized in a few sentences and non-duplicated details moved to Japanese grammar. Further, it is not very accurate. -- DannyWilde 05:14, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
Rationale: This material is very detailed and useful, and certainly should be preserved somewhere. However, it is much too detailed for the summary. I suggest moving into a new page on Japanese adjectives or into Japanese grammar. -- DannyWilde 05:14, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
Minor detail. -- DannyWilde 05:14, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
*Japanese has many ways to express levels of politeness. These strategies include the use of special verbal inflection, the use of separate nouns and verbs indicating respect or humility, and certain
affixes.
Repetition of subsection. -- DannyWilde 05:14, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
*The word desu/da is the
copula verb. It does not correspond exactly to the English be verbs, and often takes on other roles. In the sentences above, it has played the copulative function of equality, that is: A = B. However a separate function of "to be" is to indicate existence, for which the verbs aru ある and iru いる are used for inanimate and animate things, respectively.
Rationale: simplify to two or three sentences -- DannyWilde 05:14, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
*Japanese has many words that are translated as
pronouns in
English. However, none of these words are grammatically
pronouns in Japanese, but may be thought of instead as referential nouns. Referential nouns are all regular nouns, in that they may be modified by adjectives, whereas true pronouns may not be. For example, a Japanese speaker can say manuke na kare wa nani mo shinai "stupid (copula) he (topic) nothing does", but in English this would have to be broken into two statements, as we cannot say "stupid he": "he's stupid and doesn't do anything". Which one of these referential nouns is used depends upon many factors, including who is speaking, who is being spoken to, and the social setting. Their use is often optional, since Japanese is described as a so-called
pro-drop language, i.e., one in which the subject of a sentence does not always need to be stated. For example, instead of saying Watashi wa byōki desu "I am sick," if the speaker is understood to be the subject, one could simply say Byōki desu "To be sick." A single verb can be a complete sentence: yatta! "(I / we / they / etc) did (it)!".
Rationale: Repetition of material in Japanese grammar. Too detailed for summary. I suggest simplifying this and moving any non-duplicated material elsewhere. -- DannyWilde 05:14, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
How were the languages of the Three Kingdoms of Korea related to each other, and what is their supposed relationship to modern Korean and Japanese. Wikipedia doesn't seem to be particularly clear on this subject.
the see also list was flagged as long. as many of the entries in the list are in the category Japanese Language, shld they be removed from the see also list, while only retaining a link to the category?
following are the links in the JapLang see-also list also present in JapLang category.
Doldrums 19:18, 12 October 2005 (UTC)
I already made the point above: Remove all kanji/kana. They do absolutely nothing to illustrate Japanese grammar, and serve to make the section unreadable. Romaji is enough for the grammar section. At that time, I removed all the kanji and kana from the grammar section. I still don't see any sensible reason to add the kanji and kana to the grammar section, hence I removed it all again today. If there is a good reason to have it, please discuss here. -- DannyWilde 05:22, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
For me it's a question of style and content. In this case, I think the script adds no content and has a marginally negative impact on style. If you could convince me that there's even the slightest content-oriented benefit to keeping the script, I'd probably argue for its re-inclusion. But my inference from the replies on this subject is that most people either can't read the script so it adds nothing or they can read the script but it still adds nothing that the romanization doesn't. Count me in the latter category: I see no content or style benefit to adding the script.
Personally I think it all should be a moot point. The grammar section is way too long as it is, given the nice comprehensive Japanese grammar article. I'd support Danny's proposal (above) to trim down the grammar section to bring it more in line with the other languages' articles (e.g. French language, Spanish language). CES 16:55, 22 November 2005 (UTC)
Does anyone besides me find the glosses to the following phrases in the grammar section confusing?
"Negatives are formed from verb conjugations. For example,
大学にいく。 Daigaku ni iku. "Go to university.",
becomes
大学にいかない。 Daigaku ni ikanai. "I don't (he doesn't) go to university." (Indicative, not imperative.),
with iku "to go" changing to the negative form ikanai."
If I didn't understand the Japanese phrases, I'd really have little idea of what exactly is going on in these sentences. It seems like part of the problem is in the translation itself (the first phrase is not even a complete sentence and sounds like an imperative, the two translated phrases aren't really parallel in meaning, and the "(he doesn't)" in the second phrase is certain to confuse many people). Part of the problem is that the word "university" is used in a non-standard manner for US English at least. Finally, part of the problem is the fact that the phrases can indicate going to school in the general sense (as in "she goes to school at State U.") or in a specific sense ("she went to school today").
It seems like the point of this section should be to simply show how "X (Verb)s" becomes "X doesn't (Verb)". How about replacing the above example with something simpler like:
Pan o taberu. "I will eat bread."
Pan o tabenai. "I will not eat bread."
I realize these sentences could be translated different ways, but for our purposes as an intro to Japanese grammar, doesn't something like this make more sense? If someone has a better example, that would be great. But the phrases we have now are downright confusing. CES 14:25, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
By loose analogy with verb aspect I guess that "article aspect" means definiteness; but is that a standard term? — Tamfang ( talk) 03:44, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
Don't all clarify at once ... — Tamfang ( talk) 07:43, 12 February 2013 (UTC)
There is debate and uncertainty elsewhere about whether "romaji" refers only to Japanese words transliterated into the Latin alphabet (e.g. konnichiwa) or whether it also includes embedded use of Roman characters within Japanese text, such as the adoption of acronyms like "DVD". Whichever definition is accepted, I'm not sure that "often in the form of rōmaji" actually makes sense. I'm tempted to remove it, but does anyone else have a view? 86.160.221.80 ( talk) 03:55, 19 February 2013 (UTC)
10= dew — Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.194.155.222 ( talk) 20:55, 11 February 2015 (UTC)
The article currently says:
.
"Instead ... typically" gives the impression that such special forms serve to disambiguate in most cases where pronouns are omitted. In fact, this is not true, as far as I understand it. These special "giving"/"receiving" forms apply only in a relatively small number of cases, and, of course, normally only with human subjects. 81.159.105.254 ( talk) 02:38, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
As for the reference to "usted" in Spanish, "Usted" (being 2nd person formal/respectful pronoun) is actually from Arabic, the source being the Arabic word "Ustaz" which literally means "professor" or "teacher", but is used as an honorific in the 2nd person. Never heard reference to what is quoted in the article before, but then my Spanish is street Spanish, and not Castilian from the court in Madrid. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jmland2 ( talk • contribs) 21:30, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
The Phonology section makes the statement that:
However, consonant clusters across syllables are allowed as long as the two consonants are a nasal followed by a homorganic consonant. |
In the orthography, and in careful speech, this is the case -- you only ever encounter intersyllabic clusters based on ん (the moraic nasal), such as:
However, in everyday speech, other clusters also occur with the sibilant sounds, such as:
Japanese-language references about Japanese phonology, such as the NHK日本語発音アクセント辞典 ( NHK Japanese Pronunciation Accent Dictionary, ISBN 978-4-14-011112-3), describe certain vowels as being unvoiced in particular words. This is often indicated in Japanese phonology texts by circling the kana containing the unvoiced vowel with a dotted line, as in した (shita, “did”). In careful speech, the unvoiced vowel is realized by speakers making that mouth shape but just omitting the voice, indicated in IPA by an under-circle, as in [ɕi̥ta̠]. However, in more casual speech, the sibilant alone is pronounced, with the unvoiced vowel so foreshortened as to be effectively omitted, producing [ɕta̠] instead.
I think this bears mentioning in the article. Has anyone run across published materials describing this phenomenon? I thought Shibatani might have, but I cannot find my copy at the moment. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 17:51, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
The infobox says that Japanese is the "official" language in Japan, but the main text says it "has no official status". Something not quite right there. 86.151.119.98 ( talk) 03:42, 8 December 2013 (UTC)
i want a leave for tommoro but will come on friday — Preceding unsigned comment added by 211.134.208.20 ( talk) 13:22, 24 December 2013 (UTC)
I'm not sure how this source and this source support "and the Philippines (particularly in Davao and Laguna)" at the end of Japanese language#Geographic distribution, so I have removed them per WP:RSCONTEXT and WP:SYN. Both links are dead, but archived versions can be found here and here.
The first source is about pottery in the Philippines. There is no mention of either "Davao" or "Laguna" at all in the article and no mention of "Japanese" as a language or its spread to the Philippines. The phrase "Japanese texts" is used quite a bit, but I don't believe this is in reference to the Japanese language. Rather, I believe it is referring to materials written in Japanese about pottery in the Philippines. I just don't see any direct connection between this source and the "geographic distribution" of the Japanese language.
The second source "The Cultural Influences of India, China, Arabia, and Japan" only makes reference to "Japan" twice throughout the entire article. Once in the title and once in the sentence "The Japanese made some important contributions to Philippine life too. They taught the early Filipinos certain industries such as the manufacture of arms and tools, the tanning of deerskin, and the artificial breeding of ducks and fish." Again, there is no mention of "Davao" or "Laguna" or "Japanese language" and its spread to the Philippines. Whatever connection there is between this source and the "geographic distribution" is very flimsy at best in my opinion and unacceptable per "RSCONTEXT".
I think it's possible that the IP who added these sources with this edit was acting in good faith, but was also interpreting them in a way that is not acceptable per WP:SYN. I normally don't delete links just because they are dead, but instead try to fix them per WP:PLRT. If another editor can figure out a way to make these links work, then please do, but I think this is a problem that cannot be fixed. - Marchjuly ( talk) 04:39, 18 December 2014 (UTC)
色は匂えど 散りぬるを 我が世たれぞ 常ならん 有為の奥山 今日越えて 浅き夢見じ えいもせず-- 61.202.226.126 ( talk) 08:44, 6 June 2015 (UTC)
@ WikiImprovment78: What are you trying to say here? General Ization Talk 14:06, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
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In section History#Old Japanese: "Old Japanese does not have /h/, but rather /ɸ/ (preserved in modern fu, /ɸɯ/), which has been reconstructed to an earlier */p/."
This statement appears to state that Old Japanese had the phoneme /ɸ/, while */p/ was present in an earlier stage. The article on Old Japanese is fairly clear in reconstructing the phoneme as */p/ during the Old Japanese period, which ended in the 8th century. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Vimitsu ( talk • contribs) 02:32, 30 September 2015 (UTC)
Hi. Someone cited this page as a source in an article. Can someone here translate it? Thanks. Nightscream ( talk) 20:54, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
In the infobox in the beginning of the article "Japanese language" (nihongo) is written in Japanese script. It looks like a semi-cursive script but the shape of the bottom part of 言 (口) is quite unusual. There is a lot of semi-cursive styles in China and Japan, so I am not telling that this is absolutely wrong, but I think that this shape is too rare to be chosen as the representative shape in this introduction. -- Maidodo ( talk) 08:53, 20 May 2016 (UTC)
As there is no accepted classification and the official japanese side say it is isolated, we should change the color to isolated. adopting from japanese wiki,
actually there are no japanese linguists that support the altaic theory anymore. also most or all modern western linguists say japonic and koreanic are not altaic,
so the japanese support mostly the isolated or austronesian theory and koreans the isolated or dravido-koreanic theory, but also the paleo-asian theory made by Vovin alexander. the altaic theory is dead. no genetically connection. so it is sooner or later clear that the altaic theory, if true, only include turkic, mongolic and tungusic.
-- 이준성 오스트리아 ( talk) 16:39, 3 November 2016 (UTC)
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I am removing all the inappropriate links from here. I recently did the same thing on the kanji page, and put them on a new page learning kanji. Some people objected to this new page as it was inappropriate for Wikipedia. I agree with the objection to the "learning kanji" page, and in the light of that discussion here I have just removed all the spam and irrelevant links. -- DannyWilde 00:12, 5 September 2005 (UTC)
I am removing the "arigato comes from Portuguese obligato" line. This has been debunked a million times. I am a near-native Japanese speaker who has lived in the country over eight years.--The Fay.
The statement "In Japanese, a stressed syllable is merely pronounced at a higher pitch" is wrong. Japanese pitch accents are manifested as steep *drops* in pitch. Someone needs to explain the Japanese pitch accent system. Maybe I'll do it myself one of these days when I can find the time...
I think it would be a good idea to include Japanese phonemes here - although of c. not all scholars agree on whether say /S/ (as in Japanese shakuhachi) is actually a phoneme...but the number of phonemes etc. is controversial in most languages... http://pub3.ezboard.com/fhumanjapanesejapanesegrammar.showMessage?topicID=509.topic Wathiik----
I saw your posting and I tend agree with the other guy, Shibatani. So you see there are problems already. I assume he posited the /Q/ because these "double consonants" are proceeded by a very brief glottal stop. Or, maybe he is stuck to the writing system, where the double consonants are written tsu+C? However, if you want to post your analysis, I would link it to this page, which is really not a linguistic analysis.
[I thought that some info on the history of the language and writing system would be useful, but didn't know where it fit. Other things I would add - A quick note on 'small tsu' stopping, a intro to counters, and a mention of additional blending options in Katakana (vowels and also the newer 'v blends'). Just some ideas.]
Are there similar words with Turkish? Like "teppen" and "tepe"? Aknxy 15:55, Apr 6, 2005 (UTC)
Sorry. Had to be more precise. I mean words having same or similar meaning and same or similar pronounciation. "Teppen" seems to be one of them. According to dictionary it means: top, summit in Japanese. "Tepe" on the other hand has exactly the same meaning in Turkish. My Japanese teacher was saying that there are some 300 or so similar words like that. I don't know any other examples. But my Japanese is not good. Is this information true? Is it possible? Aknxy 21:55, Apr 21, 2005 (UTC)
Removed the references to Estonian and Finnish from the text, because it may be confused such that those are Altaic languages. The "Ural-Altaic family" is merely a suggestion; even though Uralic and Altaic languages have influenced each other, the consensus is that no common origin has been demonstrated. -- Vuo 02:48, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Japanese is usually classified as an Altaic language. I think there is some scholarly debate about classification of languages re Japanese, but it's usually found under "Altaic" in most family trees. I'm not sure how to effect a change of this? Will find out
Japanese has no proven relation to Altaic languages. Some scholars think it might have such relation but general concensus is that nothing has been proven so far. -- User:Taw
What a awful English-centrism. Sentences need no subject is majority of Indo-European languages. English is weird because they do need subject. Just look at: Latin, Italian, Polish, Russian, any other Slavic language (and many more). -- User:Taw
First, "grammatical subject" and "information about subject" are two different things. Most languages don't require first, but usually have some form of second (verb ending, politeness level etc.).
Second, there are sentences which genuinely have no semantic subject, but need grammatical subject in English, like:
There are many other such constructs in Polish, in both colloquial and polite language.
Third, Latin also doesn't need subject, only information about subject. -- User:Taw
Check http://pl.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?J%EAzyk_japo%F1ski and all related pages on Polish Wikipedia. There is really lot of stuff there. -- User:Taw
According to sci.lang.japanese faq, Kunrei standard says that Hepburn-written words in Kunrei text are "only to be used for words with strong international connotations, those that are customarily romanised that way or if it strongly improves the information content". I think that "Romaji" and "Kanji" are such words, but don't have strong feelings about that. I prefer kana anyway. -- User:Taw
Tomasz, I like kana for two reasons:
1) They are cute.
2) When putting up karaoke lyrics for an international group to sing along with, would you not prefer kana? There are so many romaji systems.
I fixed some formatting in the conversation examples. -- Ed Poor
This needs to be checked for accuracy before posting:
Sometimes, a word in Japanese both looks and sounds like a word in Chinese. Examples:
Pronunciation (in SAMPA) | ||||
Word | Meaning | Japanese | Chinese | Korean |
愛 | love | /ai/ | /ai/ | /{/ |
存在 | existence | /sonzai/ | /sondzai/Is this right? | /dZondZ{/ |
This is because of borrowing of words from Chinese into Japanese.
However, not all words which were borrowed in this way are alike in today's speech. There may even be false friends. An interesting case is that of the Japanese numeral for ten (/dZu:/), because it sounds like the Chinese numeral for nine (/dZju/ is this right?). (The Japanese numeral for nine is /kju:/.)
ten in Korean /Sip/, nine in Korean between /ku:/ and /gu:/. --Kein Linguist
Examples from Korean, etc., would be good as well. I think they exist.
The article looks like still a language guide for English-speakers. While it is not completely wrong, it might mislead people. I don't think for example, Romaji is such a big topic in Japanese language because the Japanese hardly use it in their everyday life. So I will or did already:
Or you can help me out to do this if you happen to know something about Japanese language. Cheers! -- Taku 13:32 May 14, 2003 (UTC)
The language is heavily tied to Japanese culture and vice-versa
-- Well, all languages are tied to their respective cultures. Japanese happens to be tied to only one culture (taking as granted that there is only one culture in Japan). Isn't it so? Marco Neves 03:21, 11 Aug 2003 (UTC)Marco Neves
I made a major edit, changing the following:
Things we should still do:
MattH 05:31, 22 Aug 2003 (UTC)
I made another edit. I
MattH 07:08, 28 Aug 2003 (UTC)
I think there's a mistake in this paragraph, but I don't want to change it because I'm not certain:
I don't think that right-to-left horizontal writing is ever used today. What appears to be right-to-left horizontal writing can be explained as vertical writing in which each column contains only one character. (This theory would be falsified by the existence of a passage written right-to-left which spans more than one line.)
I've never heard of its being used historically either, but that could easily be ignorance on my part.
-- BenRG
RTL horizontal writing is still used. Some examples include the engraved characters on some monuments as well as old-style banners and signs. It is rare but occasionally encountered, so deserves a mention.
Brion -- vertical (top to bottom, right to left) and horizontal (just like English) writing styles are both in common use. I tried to edit that section to make it clearer.
With regard to the section on politeness and "language levels": my impression (I've studied Japanese for nine years but am not fluent) is that there are two independent kinds of politeness level, not just one as the section currently suggests. One kind depends on who you're talking to, and has only two levels, da and desu/masu (which correspond to the tu and vu of European languages). The other depends on who you're talking about (in relation both to you and to the person you're talking to), and it has at least four levels: ordinary, honorific, humble, and contemptuous (yagaru). The two can appear in almost any combination; e.g. for iku the eight possible combos are iku, ikimasu, irassharu, irasshaimasu, mairu, mairimasu, ikiyagaru, and ikiyagarimasu. Of these only the last seems implausible to me, and only because I can't think of any social situation in which it would be appropriate to use it. It's not ruled out grammatically, though.
Does this sound right/wrong to anyone? Should I edit the politeness section to reflect it?
-- BenRG
Teineigo/Keigo is a thorny issue all around, and there are lots of theories on how best to present it to an English speaker. BenRG is right that, as an example, I may be talking informally to a good friend about my teacher, and whenever I mention the teacher I do so respectfully. However, I may also use keigo with the person I am speaking with. Japanese doctors often speak to their patients using keigo. So it does not seem to merely be a question of speech to or about. All the forms may be used with anyone at any time, depending on the circumstances.
I think the best way to present it is with the Japanese concepts. Clearly there are two basic speaking styles: kudaketa (da, verbs ending in -ru, etc.) and teineigo (desu/masu). But this is, of course, something of a simplification, because a good friend may say something like gambarimasu! to his best friend, and the -masu merely adds connotations of seriousness and sincerity. Nonetheless, this dichotomy seems like the best way to present basic formality/informality.
Then there would also need to be a discussion on the particulars of standard, humble, honorific, and even contemptuous speaking styles. Most of this seems to be currently included, but there is always room for more.
While I'm thinking about it, there should probably also be a mention of the differing styles of written Japanese (de aru vs. da vs. nothing at all, etc.).
-- MattH 05:20, 15 Sep 2003 (UTC)
I guess what I'm wondering is: is there any situation in which an honorific verb is used, but the person being honored is not the (explicit or implicit) grammatical subject of the verb?
You mentioned that doctors use keigo when speaking with patients. I would expect this in cases where the patient is also the subject of the sentence, which s/he would be most of the time because people go to doctors to be told things about themselves (or their body parts at any rate).
I found this message (on the Teach Yourself Japanese Message Board) which argues for the to/about idea: http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/~ts/japanese/message/message.cgi?sjis;file=jpnDQjvT55HDQjA4nAm.html
The response from TAKASUGI Shinji is also interesting: http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/~ts/japanese/message/message.cgi?sjis;file=jpnDQkqngdLDQjvT55H.html
-- BenRG 05:31, 17 Sep 2003 (UTC)
"Humble language is used to talk about oneself to one's own group." This sentence is slightly misleading. The purpose of humble language is to elevate the person you are interacting with in the sentence you use it. You aren't really making yourself humble, per se.
Also, what is the difference that is usually made between /wo/ and /o/? Occasionally I hear Japanese people say /wo/ like wo. But most of the time /wo/ sounds exactly like /o/ to my ears.
About the pronunciation I'm really no expert, but I think that Japanese language has lots of subtle variations that happen mainly because in some cases a particular pronunciation is easier to comply phonetically. The fun/pun case when telling time is about the first one a Japanese student will learn, and info it's 100% based on phonetics. Of course there are other cases such as "shyo ga nai" turning into >"sho ga nai", etc.
On the other hand, sometimes there are subtle differences that somehow seem aimed to leave no chance to misunderstandings. That happens often with wo, for example:
"nani wo yatteimasu ka" would almost certainly be pronounced as /o/, while something like "ki ga jukusu nowo matsu" it's pronounced as /wo/. A clear example I can think of is "itta no?" being pronounced as "yutta no?" in order to prevent a misunderstanding between iu and iku.
Someone please correct me, I’m far from being the fittest for this, but I wanted this to be explained here ;)
About ha which is pronounced as wa when used as particle: Yes, that's true but that doesn't mean it should be written as ha in Romaji. In my experience, and I just looked in 3 books and 2 dictionaries that use Romaji, the most common practice is to write it as wa. I propose that our article adopts this convention too. So instead of saying ha and explaining "pronounce it wa", we should write wa and explain "which is actually ha". -- 130.158.65.240 03:16, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
This seems to me to be an excellent article - I'm learning Japanese and there are a number of things which are explained better here than in my textbooks. So thanks to everyone who's worked on it.
I'd be inclined, though, to agree with 130.158.65.240 above, that "ha which is pronounced as wa when used as a particle" seems confusing. Surely the transliteration to romaji means that it should be written (in Romaji) the way that it sounds.
Also, standard practise in the textbooks is to write it (in romaji) as wa. So I've changed the text to "Kochira is the topic of the sentence, indicated by the particle wa (which is written as ha when used as a particle)."
I'm new to the Wikipedia, so if this change is wrong, I'm sure I can rely on someone to change it back. Thanks again for the excellent article.
-- AndyE
This sentence is misleading: "In Japanese, all syllables, with a few exceptions, are pronounced with equal length and loudness." Of course long syllables are pronounced longer than short syllables. I guess the intended meaning is that the length of a syllable is not varied in order to create stress, but that is not what the sentence says at the moment. -- Zero 23:38, 4 Apr 2004 (UTC)
I added Rendaku to the See Also list. If anyone thinks it's inappropriate, feel free to change it.
-- Nekokaze
This section seems like myth or nonsense to me. Inter-generational communication impossible in Japanese? 100 core words change every year? 20,000 words needed to read a newspaper? Where do these bizarre ideas come from?
Please provide references or rewrite. User:Gdr 2004 Jul 3
But those are not "intrinsic" difficulties. They may not even be difficulties for many learners. Native Chinese and Korean speakers already know kanji. Many languages have varying levels of politeness that rival those found in Japanese. Exploding Boy 07:56, Jul 5, 2004 (UTC)
Yeah, I know. I'm agreeing with you, too. Exploding Boy 15:08, Jul 5, 2004 (UTC)
OK, we didn't get any justification for this section. So I cut it. Gdr 22:17, 2004 Jul 7 (UTC)
This section considers the claims made and why I think some of them are misleading. Gdr 15:53, 2004 Jul 13 (UTC)
I read with interest this section and the resulting debate, and while there is a kernel of truth to some of the claims made, the whole section is fundamentally problematic because it makes a fundamental assumption that mainstream linguistics rejects; that one language can be objectively and measurably more or less X than some other language, where X is one of difficult, complicated, easy to learn, logical, descriptive etc. It is true that certain aspects of a language can make it easier or harder to learn for speakers of certain other languages, but no language is universally harder or easier than some other language. Certainly Kanji and politeness levels make Japanese harder to learn for English speakers than another Indo-European language, but the claim that core Japanese vocabulary is an order of magnitude larger than English's is frankly laughable.
Secondly, the argument about rate of language change is based on flawed analysis of the data. Saying that edition 2 from year 1991 had X words and edition 3 from year 2001 had X+1000 words; therefore Japanese adds 100 words per year on average is not a reasonable conclusion. How many words that are in a dictionary is much less a function of a size of a language than it is a function of the editorial policies of the dictionary makers. But even disregarding this flawed method of measuring language change, by way of comparison, the Oxford English Dictionary releases a list of 50-100 new English words every quarter. That's 200-400 new words a year, which is larger than your measure of Japanese language change, but as GDR pointed out, the majority of new words in a language aren't core vocabulary but are words at the fringes of language, used only in special areas. Further, the evidence I've read is that the majority of new words in Japanese are English borrowings anyway.
I have more to say about the claims of the size of the 95% core vocabulary, but I have to think more about it.
Nohat 01:51, 14 Jul 2004 (UTC)
As to the claim,
I have to say that the foremost problem with it is that it is unclear what it means exactly. First, I have to assume "read and understand over 95% of articles" means "read and understand over 95% of the words in articles", meaning that having a knowledge of the "core vocabulary" of a language would mean that if you were to read a newspaper, you would recognize and understand 95% of the total words, not unique words. Is this what is meant? It isn't clear. I would like to see a cross-linguistic comparative study that shows that this "95% core vocabulary" is significantly larger for Japanese than for other languages. I would be very surprised to see if that were true. But even if it were true, is this really a measure of the size of the core vocabulary, or is it a measure of the relative difficulty of writing of newspapers between Japanese and other languages. It may be simply a cultural idiosyncrasy that newspapers are written in an especially difficult-to-understand style with baroque vocabulary. In this case, the "95% core vocabulary" measure using newspapers isn't really a measure of the language itself, but a measure of the style used by newspaper article writers.
Nohat 02:06, 14 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Now hold on just a minute. First, let me say, Nohat: excellent post. Regarding this whole business with kanji, 1945 characters are designated for "daily use." These are the kanji a Japanese person must have mastered upon completion of high school. Any written work containing characters not on this list must print them with a phonetic guide. Roman characters are not very often used in newspapers, but in any case that would hardly be an obstacle to English speakers.
Giving estimates of numbers of words is always an iffy business. What qualifies as a word? Some people say the English language has more words than any other (somewhere in the region of 2 million by some counts). But what does that mean in practical terms?
Back to kanji, simply knowing 2000-odd individual kanji is not nearly enough for literacy. Some kanji compounds are intuitive (before and day means the other day, for example), but many are not: "each other" plus "kill" does not mean "to kill each other." It actually has nothing to do with killing at all.
Anyway, I have to agree with Nohat on this one: no language is universally harder or easier than some other language. Exploding Boy 10:29, Jul 15, 2004 (UTC)
Are there any examples of these? I was under the impression that Japanese words could have a coda consonant "n" or a long vowel, but not both. To the best of my knowledge this means a syllable can be either one mora ("short") or two ("long"). — Gwalla | Talk 05:44, 17 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I think a direct link to a list of honorific suffixes in the Politeness section would be nice. I don't know if such a list exists on WP. Although I found many mentions of these suffixes on different pages, I couldn't find an exhaustive list anywhere. I'd really like to see such a list, or at least one with the most used ones and their meaning/usage. --[[User:Gedeon| Ged ( talk) ( email)]] 23:23, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I've always been told that hiragana was created by women, based on a simplified version of Kanji. A quick search online elsewhere returned this information: (Taken from www.takase.com) During the end of the Nara period and during the Heian period, literary women (who were not allowed access to the male dominated Chinese learning) developed a syllabary that encompassed all 51 sounds of the Japanese language. This syllabary was based on the Sousho form of the Chinese characters and has a very feminine, flowing form. This style was originally called "onna-de" or "feminine-hand" and is now called "hiragana" and commonly called the cursive style of syllabary.
Obviously, the source is not unimpeachable, but it does mesh well with what I've heard elsewhere. Anyone know a good way to verify this one way or another?
-- Beska 16:03, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I've started a page on historical kana usage. Let the flames begin! adamrice
I'm not a linguist, and I've been taking for granted that Japanese has no diphthongs, however I found out yesterday when trying to explain the "OK" pronunciation to a Japanese that they DO know the concept (二重母音、nijyuuboin. loosely translated, double-weight vowel). As far as I know, Japanese consider things like hyo, byo, pyu, etc, etc. (basically anything that has a small ya/yu/yo) as diphthongs. After some thought, I think it makes sense, but I'm not a linguist. SpiceMan 22:06, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC)
I changed some of the nonsensical examples. I don't know how the rest of you pronounce it, but I pronounce "father" with more of an "aw" sound.
I suspect this is more about variations of English pronunciation (US vs UK) than about Japanese....but I think it is wrong to say that the vowel /o/ is like in HOPE. It is more like 90% of HOP and 10% of HOPE. Like these:
http://physics.uwyo.edu/~brent/jal/faq-6.wav
http://www.thejapanesepage.com/mp3/yoroshiku.mp3
http://www.japanese-online.com/language/kana3.wav
--
Zero 12:28, 24 Jan 2004 (UTC)
I don't remember where I read this, but I had read that the Japanese vowels /o/ and /e/ are pronounced [ɔ] and [ɛ], respectively, which also matches the vowels as I hear them. Can anyone else verify this?
Can anyone give an example of a Japanese word with a glottal stop? User: Fg2
Yes and no. Glottal stops may accompany geminates (i.e., double consonants) in some words (see below), but are entirely absent in the pronunciation of fricatives like /s/.
Meaning that, since, to take the first example, the word "school" is made up of two words, "gaku" and "ko," when they're put together the sound changes from gakuko to gaKKo (sounds like gak-ko). Exploding Boy 16:31, Jul 27, 2004 (UTC)
I'm not a linguist, but when I was taking Japanese classes we were told they were glottal stops. Exploding Boy 16:48, Jul 27, 2004 (UTC)
The characters you entered won't display on my computer, but if you're a linguist it should be easy enough to figure it out. What occurs is a doubling of a single consonant: itte (go) is pronounced it.te. Nippon is Nip.pon. Gakkou is gak.ko. Issen is is.sen. Exploding Boy 01:15, Jul 28, 2004 (UTC)
Still confused. I've read Glottal stop, and the link from there to Place of articulation, and gakkō sounds to me like a palatal stop: the tongue presses against the roof of the mouth to stop the flow of air. Or velar. I'm not sure where the boundaries within the mouth are. Itte seems alveolar, that is, the tongue presses against ridge behind the teeth. Issen seems not to be a stop, because the breath continues to flow. Ippon is labial, that is, the lips stop the air flow. I cannot think of a stop in Japanese that involves using the larynx to stop the air, as in the English uh-oh. Of course, I'm no linguist, so maybe I've misinterpreted those articles. Like OJ, I'll keep searching for the true glottal stop. Fg2 11:56, Nov 7, 2004 (UTC)
I'm with Fg2 on this. It seems pretty clear from Glottal stop that gakko, itte, ippon, issen etc. are not glottal stops. The true Japanese glottal stop only occurs at the end of some interjections, such as ita' (ouch!) and a' (ah!). These are written with a small tsu (っ or ッ) at the end of the word.
I am curious as to what source you are consulting for the phonetic & phonological description of geminate consonants. Can you list the reference(s)? I would like to see something where this was measured instrumentally. Here is a quote that you might find interesting from Akamatsu (1997:156):
Additionally, in footnote #442 Akamatsu (1997:334) states some other previous descriptions by Japanese phoneticians:
References:
Anway, this makes me want to investigate this further. Cheers! -- Ish ishwar 00:14, 2005 Jan 6 (UTC)
There is a glottal stop in Japanese(and it is mark orthograpgically with the small "tsu") but it defiently NOT found in the gemmination of voicless stops (p,t,k). The glottal stop found in Japanese is in few interjections like "ah", written 'a' + small 'tsu'. The glottal stop in Japanese isn't a very productive phone, as a matter of fact I don't even believe it is considered a phoneme at all. As far as in the "doubled" stops what simply is happening here is that there is an inaudible release of the stop followed an audible and unaspirated release. quite literally 2 stops. ex: [nip'pon], [gak'ko:]. The syllable structure of those to vords is /CVC CVN/ /CVC CV/ respectively. All this is clearly pointed out in the wikipidea article about the Japanese language. - Alejandro Canizales
Hi.
I found a study using fiberscope observation where the authors find that the glottis is open during geminate consonant production and furthermore, the glottis is open even wider for geminate consonants than for single consonants (Sawashima & Miyazaki 1973). That is somewhat surprising! So Akamatsu and others are quite correct.
Anyway, interesting stuff. Peace - Ish ishwar 09:02, 2005 Feb 7 (UTC)
The edit from "218.223.121.169" at 18:22, 3 Aug 2004 is "suspicious" and should (IMO) be partially reverted. It contains at least some legitimate rephrasing (I didn't check them all) but also removes many links and add a broken one. Could someone look into that? I don't have time right now myself... --[[User:Gedeon| Ged ( talk)]] 14:08, 7 Aug 2004 (UTC)
We had an anonymous edit changing the section on Katakana from: "words and names from foreign languages" to "words and names from foreign languages other than Chinese and Korean".
However, from my experience in Japan, katakana are indeed used for modern loan words borrowed from Mandarin, Cantonese, and Korean, like:
Many of these are food words, but I believe it does show that loan words from almost any language, including some from Chinese and Korean, can be written in katakana. Modern loan words almost universally seem to be written using katakana. Of course, a huge portion of the Japanese lexicon comprises direct borrowings from Chinese languages and is written using kanji, but it's not a hard-and-fast rule that katakana is never used to write Mandarin, Cantonese, and Korean loanwords.
-- Che Fox 16:39, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)
How has Japanese changed over the past centuries? That is, what differences are there between modern Japanese and archaic Japanese. What are the present tendencies in the language? 213.226.138.241 13:38, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)
This description of Japanese syllables (that I found in the "Sounds" section) is overly complex, totally euro-centred, and is likely unrecognizable to any Japanese speaker:
I have moved it here and substituted a description from a Japanese moraic point of view which is obviously simpler (though I'm open to correction). Breaking syllables in the middle of a geminate consonant, while it's obvious to English-speakers, would not make sense at all to a Japanese speaker. It just complicates the language in a way that can't be described with the Kana at all. At the moment I've removed the first description. My real point of doubt is whether the first description has value and should be in the article, or should just be left out.
Steverapaport 14:13, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)
P.S. If in fact, western linguists insist on describing moraic languages in syllabic terms, then the description above should be included, but prefaced with something like "From a Western point of view, "...
Hi.
I think that the majority of Japanese linguists of both Japanese and non-Japanese descent consider the mora to be needed in a description of Japanese phonology. A brief look over the literature will show this, I believe (I provided some of references at the bottom of the article). The very first modern linguist that worked on Japanese was Bernard Bloch (1950). He operated with the concept of mora although he used the term "syllable" due to the widespread use of this term in the non-linguistic literature, i.e. traditional European grammar literature (Bloch's "syllable" = "mora"—he mentions this in his phonemics article).
There is debate of whether Japanese needs to be described with syllables or not. Some linguists claim that the notion of syllable is irrelevant to Japanese. Other linguists claim that if the notions of both mora and syllable are used, then a greater degree of generalization can be achieved and it also will account for some exceptions under the mora-only descriptions (this mostly involves explaining the different pitch patterns). Linguists in this camp call Japanese a "mora-counting, syllable language" (McCawley 1978). This issue is still up in the air. So to state briefly, the literature emphasizes the mora and downplays the syllable, which may or may not be needed.
In addition to mora & syllable, other Japanese linguists operate with the notion of foot.
Another thing to note is that a mora could be used as a phonetic unit or a phonological unit or both.
A mora is called haku 拍 in Japanese. I don’t know much about the traditional Japanese analysis. I think that haku is basically something like a mora (but someone should check this out). Even if they are very similar, they both are defined within different theoretical systems. Somewhat off topic: I think I remember reading somewhere that the moraic nasal was not always indicated with a separate symbol (need to check this out, though)—maybe Japanese was not always mora-timed.
There is a very nice summary of this topic in an article by Haruo Kubozono in Tsujimura (1999). Peace. - Ish ishwar 00:41, 2005 Feb 7 (UTC)
If you want to describe the phonotactics succinctly, I think you could list these possible combinations:
So, even more compact:
- Ish ishwar 06:38, 2005 Feb 7 (UTC)
So what made it Euro-centric? The fact that the analysis was free of the restraints necessarily imposed by kana? As Ish mentioned, many scholars think that both "mora" and "syllable" are essential to describe Japanese adequately; read the literature and you'll see that. (Quick examples: long vs. short vowels & consonants requires moras, but accent in verbs requires syllables.)
As I read it, the description of syllables that Steverapaport objected to was trying to be all-inclusive, to describe syllables of both single moras and those of more than one mora. That it did not refer to kana is a good thing, IMHO. However, this all seems moot now, as the current article is brief to the point of terseness--and is better for it. Squidley 23:51, 14 November 2005 (UTC)
I added a recording of me saying "日本語". Lemme know if it's subpar. - karmosin 07:13, Mar 8, 2005 (UTC)
The article states that "[t]here are three types of words that correspond to adjectives in English: stative verbs (also called i-adjectives), copular nouns (na-adjectives), and the limited set of true adjectives in Japanese." While it's fashionable among linguists to call Japanese i-adjectives stative verbs, I don't believe that this view is at all accurate. About the only verb like behavior they exhibit is inflecting for tense; they still need an actual verb to form a complete predicate (*ringo-wa akai is not a complete sentence).
The only reason I'm posting this issue on the talk page rather than just changing the article is that, before I edit, I would like to have some clarification on what these mysterious "true adjectives" are -- they're not i-adjectives, and they're certainly not na-adjectives, so I'm really not sure what class of words is being referred to here. -- Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) 14:33, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Hear, hear. I've been working on Japanese since 1988, and working in Japanese off and on since 1998, and I must admit I'm befuddled as to what "true adjectives" are supposed to be. Anyone more knowledgeable than the two of us care to chime in with an answer?I would like to have some clarification on what these mysterious "true adjectives" are
if you dig back far enough, "-i"/"-shi" adjectives start looking like verbs
Kansai-ben is very close to the standard language, and varies essentially in slang; some consider it to be equivalent to the standard language
Does anyone besides me find this to be a pretty bizarre statement?
I could see a statement like the above applying to, say, the Yokohama dialect, but I'd have a hard time equating Kansai-ben with the "standard language."
CES 16:37, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I removed the entire paragraph, it seemed inaccurate and POV. CES 22:31, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I've seen Japanese katakana and kanji written left-to-right on pages, but I've also seen just kanji written top-to-bottom, with the columns right-to-left. I also notice that Japanese books are read back to front. Could information on this be included in the article? -- Poiuyt Man ( talk) 08:13, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I was looking for information about which dialects/regions formed the basis for modern Standard Japanese, but the article doesn't appear to cover that. -- Danny Yee 01:16, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Is it just me or is the "Learning Japanese" section short on actual information and long on POV? It seems like it needs to be cleaned up or deleted. CES 02:55, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)
What is the term for transcribing japanese to english, so that you can read it in english, but pronounce it as if you were reading it in japanese? Edit: and are there any online programs to do this? Babelfish just returns japanese characters.
Greetings. Would someone who can speak Japanese be kind enough to have a look over at the Reiki article? There seems to be a dispute over the actual meaning or meanings of the usage 霊気 reiki itself in Japanese. Also, there is no clear provenance as to whether the term is a recent coinage or a term from earlier Japanese history. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Regards, Fire Star 04:34, 3 May 2005 (UTC)
Would anyone strenuously object to moving the Sounds section to an independent article? The current article is 40kb, and the phonology section is sufficiently detailed to stand well-enough as an article of its own (IMHO). Tomer TALK 01:16, May 27, 2005 (UTC)
OK. I moved it. Anyone got any ideas for a mini-intro to put into the #Sounds section so it doesn't look quite so bare? Tomer TALK 13:05, May 29, 2005 (UTC)
Over at Teikyo University it says the university was originally called Teikyo Commercial High School (帝京商業高等学校; teikyo syogyo kōkō). Is that right? I can't read kanji, but it looks to me like there are too many kanji characters for that romaji transliteration. If it's wrong, could someone correct it at that page? Thanks! -- Angr/ tɔk tə mi 29 June 2005 23:38 (UTC)
This section of text is from the article.
"desu です is a contraction of de で" should this be changed to "desu です is a contraction of de gozaimasu で ございます"?
Markcox 6 July 2005 04:37 (UTC)
であります。is polite. でございます。is super polite(keigo).Like imasu and irasshaimasu. If you are a guest in a hotel, and the front desk needs to know your nationality, he would say: Amerika jin de gozaimas ka? If there is a Japanese you've casually met in a restaurant, he would say, Amerika jin des ka? A very young Japanese child hearing you speak English would ask , Amerika jin ka?(rude)
Japanese teachers seem to teach very theoretical/old/classical Japanese. I was taught that the polite form of cheap (yasui) and blue (aoi) was yasoo gozaimsu.(安そうございます。) and aoo gozaimasu(青おうございます。) But only a few very old Japanese know this. The rest tell me they don't know this. Who is right? To be on the safe side master the polite(textbook) form then learn the conversational Japanese. -- Jondel 00:52, 15 July 2005 (UTC)
It's not that they 'don't know' it ... the ~ou gozaimasu form is so rarely used and is not really a useful conjugation anymore. It exists only in a few traditional phrases like ohayou (from hayai) and arigatou, (from arigatai). Regular adjectives are not conjugated in this way. It might be in some way grammatically correct to say that the book is 'aoude gozaimasu', but laughter will result as you're using formal speech that hasn't been in common use for hundreds? of years. It IS good to know about the ~oude gozaimasu conjugation, or rather it may be interesting, if you're interested in the origin of some Japanese expressions, but it's about as useful as knowing that 'goodbye' comes from 'Good be with you' (or whatever the correct expression is).
---
About the -u form. It is actually the onbin 音便 form of "adverbs" or similar words.
the last one of which is due to the fact that the shi + u classical Japanese combination is pronounced shuu. This kind of onbin was prevalent in late-ish classical Japanese, which saw the so-called -te forms of verbs having an additional alternative onbin form in addition to the ones we are familiar with in modern Japanese, e.g. for omoo (思ふ; おもふ), omotte (おもつて) = omoote (おもうて) (standard form omoite おもひて); similarly koo (買ふ; かふ) => katte (かつて) = koote (かうて) = kaite (かひて). Note how we now say omou and write おもう instead of omoo, and kau / かう instead of koo too. As for the -u gozaimasu pattern, it is still very occasionally used. It is a very polite way of saying desu, e.g. うれしゅうございます = うれしいです. You can sort of link this to the fact that the negative is うれしくない, the positive would, if you invert the ない, be うれしくある (which would only be used if there is a reason to), now change うれしく to うれしゅう and ある to ございます. Fifty to a hundred years ago, this formation was quite a common thing. -- KittySaturn 08:57, September 2, 2005 (UTC)
As a side note of little significance, perhaps, but maybe interesting, the おはす mentioned above, owasu (not ohasu), was the only other suru (su) irregular verb besides suru (su), which can also mean aru (ari), which is why it is also considered a possible origin of desu, which died out, which (... etc.) so now we are left with suru. :-) Not only this, but owasu is the origin of the word gozaimasu. おはす (御座す) => read kanjis in on-yomi: ござ => add verb あり (= modern day ある) : ござあり => make it yodan type : ござある => shorten it : ござる => add ます : ござります => apply onbin : ございます. There are many steps to this final gozaimasu, and between each step there are many branches (e.g. the go came off, or, gozarimasu morphed into gozansu, etc. etc.), but only one form survived all these times. -- KittySaturn 09:05, September 2, 2005 (UTC)
Obviously this is not a comprehensive guide to pronounciation, but I feel the notes do not justly push the fact that Japanese simply isn't pronounced the way it looks (as Romaji). Particularly the over-simplified explanation of the pronounciation of the /o/ vowel mentioned above. Seems to be understood that the Roman spelling is merely representative and can't be relied on for accurate pronouncation (although pronouncing Japanese as it looks in English will probably render a speaker at least mostly intelligible to most Japanese) but while most basic Japanese langauge texts try to imply /wo/ changes to /o/ (as far as relative pronounciation) this simply isn't true in the most common dialects. /wo/ does undergo an audible change in MANY or MOST of Japanese speakers -- probably less predominantely in the younger generation [speculation here] -- but it is dependant on the surrounding sounds as opposed to the grammar function. For example; a fairly common name, Kaori, becomes rather uncommon when the character /wo/ is used instead of /o/. There is no change in pronounciation, even though it may be spelled Kawori. Also notable is how it sounds in music, especially when it is drawn out; the /wo/ style sound is much more pronounced. The basic reason for this is that the sound is formed in a slightly different part of the mouth (or a slightly different way) than it is in English. Thus the /wo/ sound often finds it's way into borrowed or commonly 'katakana-ized' words or phrases, for example 'carry on' which sounds like 'carry won' or 'carry uon' coming from the mouth of most non-English speaking Japanese. A very similar distinction is seen in the sounds for /n/ (for example, the pronounciation of yen vs. en), /zu/ and all the /z/ sounds (which sound more like /dzu/ etc.), and /fu/, which really isn't anything like the english /fu/ at all.
This is all very wordy and I don't believe it's exactly useful in this document, but I think it should be stressed that English romanizations for Japanese sounds are not extremely representative. At least then some people would stop argueing about which English character 'it' sounds like, knowing that it doesn't really matter at all. Gavin 2005 07 15
there's an error of translation near: "Nihon" (にほん) can mean "two books" (二本) as well as "Japan" (日本). 本 is the counter for long, thin cylidrical objects, not for books. komuta, 2005 07 21
Thank you for your suggestion! When you feel an article needs improvement, please feel free to make whatever changes you feel are needed. Wikipedia is a wiki, so anyone can edit almost any article by simply following the Edit this page link at the top. You don't even need to log in! (Although there are some reasons why you might like to…) The Wikipedia community encourages you to be bold. Don't worry too much about making honest mistakes—they're likely to be found and corrected quickly. If you're not sure how editing works, check out how to edit a page, or use the sandbox to try out your editing skills. New contributors are always welcome. — Gwalla | Talk 04:29, 24 July 2005 (UTC)
Concerning the latest tweaks to the lead, could someone tell me what linguists that actually claim that Chinese and Japanese are related? If it's only completely fringe scholars, I don't see the merit of stating that it's "largely accepted". Is this on the same level as Nostratic languages, or are there reasonable doubts accepted by a majority of scholars? Personally, I've never even heard crackpot claims of Chinese and Japanese being distantly related.
Peter Isotalo 18:36, 25 July 2005 (UTC)
It's even worse than Nostratic, since there are Nostratists who include Japanese as a candidate for nostratic, but not Chinese. Tomer TALK 22:35, July 25, 2005 (UTC)
I think it's likely that the majority of linguists discount a connection between Japanese and Chinese, a judgement that seems justified based on the fact that basic aspects of their grammar systems are completely different (SOV and SVO etc.) but many (normal) people would still argue that their is a connection, due to the similarity in sound of a large number of words. It may be that Japanese changed slightly to become more similar to Chinese more recently, but I'll leave it to the linguists to even give that much credit. freshgavin 20:32, 31 July 2005
There are a few hypothesized changes from Old Japanese through Classical Japanese which happened under the influence of Chinese. For instance, the introduction of the nasal syllabic n is probably due to a reduction of final mu syllables. This may have occurred because of the common nasal n ending many Chinese words. Note that until the kana spelling reform in the 20th century there was no sign clearly differentiating mu and n. There are a few others but they aren't at the top of my thoughts right now. Other changes certainly included grammatical changes from the introduction of vast numbers of lexical items. — Jéioosh 01:02, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
When are the hiragana ぢゃ (ja), ぢゅ (ju), and ぢょ (jo) used in place of じゃ ja, じゅ ju, and じょ jo? Hiragana doesn't explain. Guessing from how chi and tsu to ji and zu when used after chi and tsu or a kanji relevant to the meaning of a word, is it ぢゃ if ぢゃ comes after ちゃ?
I'm trying to learn Japanese, using hiragana as my first lesson. Toothpaste 11:24, 18 September 2005 (UTC)
Thank you. By the way, is こおこお-せい the correct hiragana for "kookoo-sei"? Is だいがく-せい the correct hiragana for "daigaku-sei"? Toothpaste 06:42, 19 September 2005 (UTC)
Or is it こうこうせい for high school? The former brings up more Google results. Looks like this romaji-hiragana converter was a little off. Or was "kookoo-sei" not the right romaji? "Koukou-sei" brings up more Google results, too. Toothpaste 08:48, 19 September 2005 (UTC)
Thank you very much. This link confused me with the spelling. By the way, how is "kootoogakkoo," according to that link, spelled in romaji and hiragana? Toothpaste 10:32, 19 September 2005 (UTC)
The grammar section of this article is becoming extremely long - much too long for a summary of the main article. I'd like to suggest shortening it very drastically to give the basics, and moving any non-duplicated contents from here into " Japanese grammar". If there are any objections, please state your case. -- DannyWilde 02:24, 20 September 2005 (UTC)
Further to the above comments, prior to actually doing the edits, here I have copied out the grammar section of the article, and written my comments in italics and suggestions for material to be moved elsewhere, simplified, or deleted, which are written like this. Please keep in mind that this section should be a summary of the main article
Japanese grammar when commenting - I am not suggesting removing this material from Wikipedia altogether, but from the grammar summary in the top page on the Japanese language. If anyone has any points to make, please let me know and I'll try to keep it in mind. --
DannyWilde
05:14, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
Certain aspects of Japanese grammar are highly controversial. Japanese grammar can be characterized by the following prominent features:
Remove all kanji/kana. They do absolutely nothing to illustrate Japanese grammar, and serve to make the section unreadable. Romaji is enough for the grammar section. -- DannyWilde 05:14, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
Kochira こちら is the topic of the sentence, indicated by the particle wa は (Note: ha は is pronounced wa when it is a "topic marker"); literally, it means "as for this direction," but here, it means "as for this person." The verb is desu です ("be"). As a phrase, Tanaka san desu 田中さんです is the comment. This sentence loosely translates to "As for this person, (it) is Mr./Mrs./Ms. Tanaka". So Japanese, like Chinese and Korean, is often called a topic-prominent language, which means it indicates the topic separately from the subject, and the two do not always coincide. For example, the sentence Zō wa hana ga nagai 象は 鼻が 長い literally means, "as for elephants, the nose is long." The topic is zō 象 "elephant," and the subject is hana 鼻 "nose."
Rationale: This duplicates Japanese grammar and it is not important enough to repeat in the summary.-- DannyWilde 05:14, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
Rationale: This material is not important enough for the summary. It can be summarized in a few sentences and non-duplicated details moved to Japanese grammar. Further, it is not very accurate. -- DannyWilde 05:14, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
Rationale: This material is very detailed and useful, and certainly should be preserved somewhere. However, it is much too detailed for the summary. I suggest moving into a new page on Japanese adjectives or into Japanese grammar. -- DannyWilde 05:14, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
Minor detail. -- DannyWilde 05:14, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
*Japanese has many ways to express levels of politeness. These strategies include the use of special verbal inflection, the use of separate nouns and verbs indicating respect or humility, and certain
affixes.
Repetition of subsection. -- DannyWilde 05:14, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
*The word desu/da is the
copula verb. It does not correspond exactly to the English be verbs, and often takes on other roles. In the sentences above, it has played the copulative function of equality, that is: A = B. However a separate function of "to be" is to indicate existence, for which the verbs aru ある and iru いる are used for inanimate and animate things, respectively.
Rationale: simplify to two or three sentences -- DannyWilde 05:14, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
*Japanese has many words that are translated as
pronouns in
English. However, none of these words are grammatically
pronouns in Japanese, but may be thought of instead as referential nouns. Referential nouns are all regular nouns, in that they may be modified by adjectives, whereas true pronouns may not be. For example, a Japanese speaker can say manuke na kare wa nani mo shinai "stupid (copula) he (topic) nothing does", but in English this would have to be broken into two statements, as we cannot say "stupid he": "he's stupid and doesn't do anything". Which one of these referential nouns is used depends upon many factors, including who is speaking, who is being spoken to, and the social setting. Their use is often optional, since Japanese is described as a so-called
pro-drop language, i.e., one in which the subject of a sentence does not always need to be stated. For example, instead of saying Watashi wa byōki desu "I am sick," if the speaker is understood to be the subject, one could simply say Byōki desu "To be sick." A single verb can be a complete sentence: yatta! "(I / we / they / etc) did (it)!".
Rationale: Repetition of material in Japanese grammar. Too detailed for summary. I suggest simplifying this and moving any non-duplicated material elsewhere. -- DannyWilde 05:14, 5 October 2005 (UTC)
How were the languages of the Three Kingdoms of Korea related to each other, and what is their supposed relationship to modern Korean and Japanese. Wikipedia doesn't seem to be particularly clear on this subject.
the see also list was flagged as long. as many of the entries in the list are in the category Japanese Language, shld they be removed from the see also list, while only retaining a link to the category?
following are the links in the JapLang see-also list also present in JapLang category.
Doldrums 19:18, 12 October 2005 (UTC)
I already made the point above: Remove all kanji/kana. They do absolutely nothing to illustrate Japanese grammar, and serve to make the section unreadable. Romaji is enough for the grammar section. At that time, I removed all the kanji and kana from the grammar section. I still don't see any sensible reason to add the kanji and kana to the grammar section, hence I removed it all again today. If there is a good reason to have it, please discuss here. -- DannyWilde 05:22, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
For me it's a question of style and content. In this case, I think the script adds no content and has a marginally negative impact on style. If you could convince me that there's even the slightest content-oriented benefit to keeping the script, I'd probably argue for its re-inclusion. But my inference from the replies on this subject is that most people either can't read the script so it adds nothing or they can read the script but it still adds nothing that the romanization doesn't. Count me in the latter category: I see no content or style benefit to adding the script.
Personally I think it all should be a moot point. The grammar section is way too long as it is, given the nice comprehensive Japanese grammar article. I'd support Danny's proposal (above) to trim down the grammar section to bring it more in line with the other languages' articles (e.g. French language, Spanish language). CES 16:55, 22 November 2005 (UTC)
Does anyone besides me find the glosses to the following phrases in the grammar section confusing?
"Negatives are formed from verb conjugations. For example,
大学にいく。 Daigaku ni iku. "Go to university.",
becomes
大学にいかない。 Daigaku ni ikanai. "I don't (he doesn't) go to university." (Indicative, not imperative.),
with iku "to go" changing to the negative form ikanai."
If I didn't understand the Japanese phrases, I'd really have little idea of what exactly is going on in these sentences. It seems like part of the problem is in the translation itself (the first phrase is not even a complete sentence and sounds like an imperative, the two translated phrases aren't really parallel in meaning, and the "(he doesn't)" in the second phrase is certain to confuse many people). Part of the problem is that the word "university" is used in a non-standard manner for US English at least. Finally, part of the problem is the fact that the phrases can indicate going to school in the general sense (as in "she goes to school at State U.") or in a specific sense ("she went to school today").
It seems like the point of this section should be to simply show how "X (Verb)s" becomes "X doesn't (Verb)". How about replacing the above example with something simpler like:
Pan o taberu. "I will eat bread."
Pan o tabenai. "I will not eat bread."
I realize these sentences could be translated different ways, but for our purposes as an intro to Japanese grammar, doesn't something like this make more sense? If someone has a better example, that would be great. But the phrases we have now are downright confusing. CES 14:25, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
By loose analogy with verb aspect I guess that "article aspect" means definiteness; but is that a standard term? — Tamfang ( talk) 03:44, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
Don't all clarify at once ... — Tamfang ( talk) 07:43, 12 February 2013 (UTC)
There is debate and uncertainty elsewhere about whether "romaji" refers only to Japanese words transliterated into the Latin alphabet (e.g. konnichiwa) or whether it also includes embedded use of Roman characters within Japanese text, such as the adoption of acronyms like "DVD". Whichever definition is accepted, I'm not sure that "often in the form of rōmaji" actually makes sense. I'm tempted to remove it, but does anyone else have a view? 86.160.221.80 ( talk) 03:55, 19 February 2013 (UTC)
10= dew — Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.194.155.222 ( talk) 20:55, 11 February 2015 (UTC)
The article currently says:
.
"Instead ... typically" gives the impression that such special forms serve to disambiguate in most cases where pronouns are omitted. In fact, this is not true, as far as I understand it. These special "giving"/"receiving" forms apply only in a relatively small number of cases, and, of course, normally only with human subjects. 81.159.105.254 ( talk) 02:38, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
As for the reference to "usted" in Spanish, "Usted" (being 2nd person formal/respectful pronoun) is actually from Arabic, the source being the Arabic word "Ustaz" which literally means "professor" or "teacher", but is used as an honorific in the 2nd person. Never heard reference to what is quoted in the article before, but then my Spanish is street Spanish, and not Castilian from the court in Madrid. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jmland2 ( talk • contribs) 21:30, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
The Phonology section makes the statement that:
However, consonant clusters across syllables are allowed as long as the two consonants are a nasal followed by a homorganic consonant. |
In the orthography, and in careful speech, this is the case -- you only ever encounter intersyllabic clusters based on ん (the moraic nasal), such as:
However, in everyday speech, other clusters also occur with the sibilant sounds, such as:
Japanese-language references about Japanese phonology, such as the NHK日本語発音アクセント辞典 ( NHK Japanese Pronunciation Accent Dictionary, ISBN 978-4-14-011112-3), describe certain vowels as being unvoiced in particular words. This is often indicated in Japanese phonology texts by circling the kana containing the unvoiced vowel with a dotted line, as in した (shita, “did”). In careful speech, the unvoiced vowel is realized by speakers making that mouth shape but just omitting the voice, indicated in IPA by an under-circle, as in [ɕi̥ta̠]. However, in more casual speech, the sibilant alone is pronounced, with the unvoiced vowel so foreshortened as to be effectively omitted, producing [ɕta̠] instead.
I think this bears mentioning in the article. Has anyone run across published materials describing this phenomenon? I thought Shibatani might have, but I cannot find my copy at the moment. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 17:51, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
The infobox says that Japanese is the "official" language in Japan, but the main text says it "has no official status". Something not quite right there. 86.151.119.98 ( talk) 03:42, 8 December 2013 (UTC)
i want a leave for tommoro but will come on friday — Preceding unsigned comment added by 211.134.208.20 ( talk) 13:22, 24 December 2013 (UTC)
I'm not sure how this source and this source support "and the Philippines (particularly in Davao and Laguna)" at the end of Japanese language#Geographic distribution, so I have removed them per WP:RSCONTEXT and WP:SYN. Both links are dead, but archived versions can be found here and here.
The first source is about pottery in the Philippines. There is no mention of either "Davao" or "Laguna" at all in the article and no mention of "Japanese" as a language or its spread to the Philippines. The phrase "Japanese texts" is used quite a bit, but I don't believe this is in reference to the Japanese language. Rather, I believe it is referring to materials written in Japanese about pottery in the Philippines. I just don't see any direct connection between this source and the "geographic distribution" of the Japanese language.
The second source "The Cultural Influences of India, China, Arabia, and Japan" only makes reference to "Japan" twice throughout the entire article. Once in the title and once in the sentence "The Japanese made some important contributions to Philippine life too. They taught the early Filipinos certain industries such as the manufacture of arms and tools, the tanning of deerskin, and the artificial breeding of ducks and fish." Again, there is no mention of "Davao" or "Laguna" or "Japanese language" and its spread to the Philippines. Whatever connection there is between this source and the "geographic distribution" is very flimsy at best in my opinion and unacceptable per "RSCONTEXT".
I think it's possible that the IP who added these sources with this edit was acting in good faith, but was also interpreting them in a way that is not acceptable per WP:SYN. I normally don't delete links just because they are dead, but instead try to fix them per WP:PLRT. If another editor can figure out a way to make these links work, then please do, but I think this is a problem that cannot be fixed. - Marchjuly ( talk) 04:39, 18 December 2014 (UTC)
色は匂えど 散りぬるを 我が世たれぞ 常ならん 有為の奥山 今日越えて 浅き夢見じ えいもせず-- 61.202.226.126 ( talk) 08:44, 6 June 2015 (UTC)
@ WikiImprovment78: What are you trying to say here? General Ization Talk 14:06, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
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In section History#Old Japanese: "Old Japanese does not have /h/, but rather /ɸ/ (preserved in modern fu, /ɸɯ/), which has been reconstructed to an earlier */p/."
This statement appears to state that Old Japanese had the phoneme /ɸ/, while */p/ was present in an earlier stage. The article on Old Japanese is fairly clear in reconstructing the phoneme as */p/ during the Old Japanese period, which ended in the 8th century. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Vimitsu ( talk • contribs) 02:32, 30 September 2015 (UTC)
Hi. Someone cited this page as a source in an article. Can someone here translate it? Thanks. Nightscream ( talk) 20:54, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
In the infobox in the beginning of the article "Japanese language" (nihongo) is written in Japanese script. It looks like a semi-cursive script but the shape of the bottom part of 言 (口) is quite unusual. There is a lot of semi-cursive styles in China and Japan, so I am not telling that this is absolutely wrong, but I think that this shape is too rare to be chosen as the representative shape in this introduction. -- Maidodo ( talk) 08:53, 20 May 2016 (UTC)
As there is no accepted classification and the official japanese side say it is isolated, we should change the color to isolated. adopting from japanese wiki,
actually there are no japanese linguists that support the altaic theory anymore. also most or all modern western linguists say japonic and koreanic are not altaic,
so the japanese support mostly the isolated or austronesian theory and koreans the isolated or dravido-koreanic theory, but also the paleo-asian theory made by Vovin alexander. the altaic theory is dead. no genetically connection. so it is sooner or later clear that the altaic theory, if true, only include turkic, mongolic and tungusic.
-- 이준성 오스트리아 ( talk) 16:39, 3 November 2016 (UTC)
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