Japanese Language

@snailboat Did we reach a conclusion about colloquial vs. colloquialisms vs. colloquial-language? There's also archaic, which could be archaic-language or archaisms.

I also don't like practical. According to the tag wiki, the questions should be retagged as either expressions or greetings.

Anonymous

I don't know. I think I actually prefer colloquial-language and archaic-language

Earthliŋ

Yeah, I was thinking that too

archaisms sounds clumsy

I prefer archaic-language and by analogy colloquial-language

practical also has lots of questions about spoken-language

Should metaphor be plural?

Anonymous

Well, it can be an abstract noun or a concrete noun. I took it as an abstract noun, so non-count

Earthliŋ

OK.

Anonymous

As a concrete noun, it refers to specific instances of metaphor. As an abstract noun, it refers to the concept of metaphor in general.

Earthliŋ

2:15 PM

any opinion on practical?

Anonymous

Ehh.

Anonymous

I don't know what that tag's for, really.

Earthliŋ

I guess for someone having a question about practical Japanese, which apart from scholarly musings is almost everything. But then it has only 20 questions...

Anonymous

Would it ever make sense as the sole tag on a question?

Earthliŋ

I don't see how

4

Q: Which reading is more common for 剣: tsurugi or ken

剣 by itself can be read either way. What's the difference? Clarification: In particular, when 剣 refers to a 諸刃 sword, which reading are natives more likely to use?

Anonymous

2:21 PM

Maybe it's one of those thingies they call "meta tags"

Earthliŋ

This was tagged [words] and [practical]

yeah, let's get rid of it =)

Anonymous

We have a spoken-language tag but not a written-language tag?

Earthliŋ

yes

no written-language

Anonymous

I bet we have single-word-requests because of English.SE

Anonymous

Personally I prefer plain ol' word-requests because I don't think it makes sense to limit things to a single word most of the time. But we don't get a lot of those on Japanese.SE so it hasn't been a big deal

Anonymous

2:28 PM

I think it usually makes sense to ask for the most natural way to express something, whether that's one word or more. And if someone really needs a single word they can make that clear in their question

Earthliŋ

we also have phrase-requests

and english-to-japanese

and of course translation

But I'd agree to removing "single" to begin with

Anonymous

Is there a keigo tag?

Anonymous

If we just removed 'single' from the tag name, the tag would still work for all the existing questions, but it would place less emphasis on the 'single' part. I don't think it would be a really big change

Anonymous

Oh, we do have a keigo tag

Anonymous

And politeness

Earthliŋ

2:33 PM

hm...

@TsuyoshiIto I included both "single-word" and "phrase" requests because I didn't want to limit the answer to either of them. — Flaw Nov 13 '11 at 22:24

It's been causing confusion for 3 and a half years...

how about phrase-and-word-requests

or word-phrase-requests or something

Anonymous

Hmm...

Anonymous

Before we do something like merging the two together I'd want to take some more time to look at them

Anonymous

I'm too sleepy right now

Earthliŋ

OK, good night =)

Anonymous

I think some of the existing word requests are more like "what do you call X?" rather than "I want a single word"

Anonymous

2:37 PM

Oh, no, it's the reverse... I'm still waking up!

Anonymous

I feel like I'm still half-asleep :-)

Anonymous

7

Q: What's the Japanese word for the stuff after the credits of a movie?

In English, we call footage that plays after the credits of a movie a "stinger". See, for example, the wiktionary entry, definition 8: A scene shown on films or television shows after the credits. What would you call this in Japanese? I guess you could describe it as エンドロールの後の映像, but is the...

word-requests

Anonymous

This is a "what do you call X?" question that was tagged single-word-requests

Earthliŋ

right

@snailboat Oh, I'm almost wide awake before I wake up... I can never sleep long.

Hearing about sleepy mornings reminds me of my teenage years =)

interrogatives

three questions, two about particle-ka

(I think)

Anonymous

I don't know what to put as a translation for the gender tag. That one is the merger of masculine-speech with feminine-speech (originally two separate tags)

Anonymous

2:44 PM

日本語における男女差・・・とか

Earthliŋ

Why did they get merged?

Usually it's one or the other, right?

Anonymous

There was a meta discussion

Anonymous

Let's see

Anonymous

Hmm, all I found was this...

Anonymous

3

Q: Some tag synonyms to create

I apparently don't have enough "tag score" to even suggest these so let me suggest them manually here on meta: The existing male-speech tag needs the newer tag masculine-speech made a synonym The existing female-speech tag needs the newer tag feminine-speech made a synonym

support tag-synonyms

Earthliŋ

2:47 PM

yeah

I don't really know… I tend to just ignore all tags and just look at question titles… — Axioplase Oct 20 '11 at 5:47

That's not what tags were invented for, though...

dinogeist

男女の言葉遣い seems to be often used on the Japanese internet.

Earthliŋ

I just think keeping the two separate makes for easy browsing if one's interested in learning about either...

Anonymous

@dinogeist Oh, thanks! :-)

Anonymous

I'm not sure about our publishing tag

Anonymous

Or, for that matter, alphabetical-order

Earthliŋ

2:58 PM

I think publishing should be either typography or written-language

But there's no typography, because officially, typography-related questions are off-topic

Anonymous

We have both keigo and honorifics

Earthliŋ

and prefixes

and suffixes

and bikago

=)

@snailboat what alphabetical-order =)

is ～たい a suffix? do we need tai-form?

Anonymous

3:13 PM

In traditional grammar it's a 助動詞 which attaches to 動詞の連用形

Earthliŋ

we do have auxiliaries

tai-form has three questions and it looks like a conjugation of a verb, which I don't think it is...

can I retag with auxiliaries?

Anonymous

Sure.

Anonymous

There isn't exactly an answer set in stone for "is it a suffix?" That sort of thing depends on who you're asking

Anonymous

Some people would call it a "suffixal adjective" or the "desiderative ending" or other things

Anonymous

Other people just call it 〜たい :-)

Earthliŋ

3:18 PM

Well, auxiliaries has 14 questions now. I think questions about たい are still findable in there

Anonymous

I think it's okay if we align our tags somewhat with the system used in 学校文法

Anonymous

3:37 PM

japanese.stackexchange.com/posts/886/revisions

Anonymous

He edited the tag wiki more than four years ago to say that this tag would be merged with another tag

Anonymous

But no one ever did any merging

Anonymous

I put 日本語学習 as the translation for this tag

Anonymous

Ohh, I see. study was merged into learning

Anonymous

I guess I can remove that note

Earthliŋ

4:27 PM

I saw you removed a "particles" tag. Do you think it's better to have "particles" reserved for "other-particles"

Anonymous

I just thought the other tags already addressed it.

Earthliŋ

any question about "particles" is either about [particle-wa], [particle-ni], etc. or about "other particles"

Anonymous

I admit I was kind of looking for things to tweak on the most recent few questions, because I wanted to bump them above the tagpocalypse so they didn't get neglected...

Earthliŋ

right, during the tagpocalypse, I switched to the "newest" tag

Anonymous

悪いんだが = sorry to trouble you and といてくれ = would you mind ? great keigo usage. — oldergod 8 hours ago

Anonymous

4:32 PM

This comment has two upvotes, but I don't see any keigo

Earthliŋ

he's trying to confuse you

I think he meant that "sorry to trouble you" or "would you mind" in their English translation, which is fairly polite, don't quite convey the nuance of the Japanese

maybe 悪いんだが is more like "hey man"

Anonymous

So it's supposed to be a sarcastic reply to the other comment?

Earthliŋ

I think so

actually, to me most of oldergod's comments are extremely brief and often cryptic

Anonymous

That does tend to be true.

Earthliŋ

but many of them are upvoted, too =)

I guess people like cryptic sarcasm =)

Anonymous

4:38 PM

Although if any of the comments cross the line to being mean, they should be deleted.

Earthliŋ

I think these comments are usually too short to be clearly interpreted as being mean

actually, thinking about it, I would prefer other-particles. Otherwise any question tagged particle-e could also be tagged particles, but often they're not and there's no way to find "other" particles, which don't have their own tag

Anonymous

Do we have questions about particles in general?

Anonymous

I'm not sure what you'd say about them. "They come after stuff and don't inflect."

Earthliŋ

Like "What are particles?"

I don't think so

If so, it could always be tagged "linguistics", right?

Anonymous

In the past, I think some particle tags were automatically removed because they had fewer than 5 questions

Anonymous

4:43 PM

I think we can prevent that from happening by adding a tag wiki

Anonymous

@Earthliŋ Or parts-of-speech

Anonymous

Hey, it's part-of-speech.

Anonymous

I'm going to go pluralize that one.

Earthliŋ

Oh, I found that before

in the lost message to you and jkerian

Anonymous

We could add a bunch of tag synonyms for linguistics stuff, but I don't know if it's worth doing. Like, word-class and lexical-category would both be synonyms for parts-of-speech. But that might just pollute the tag space

Earthliŋ

4:46 PM

Jun 15 at 17:37, by Earthliŋ

@snailboat @jkerian I'm not sure it's particularly prudent to discuss this on meta, so I'm asking you directly here. Could you rename the following tags to use the plural (as seems to be the de-facto convention for almost all other tags, like "verbs", "nouns", "particles", "[whatever]s", etc.):

Jun 15 at 17:38, by Earthliŋ

part-of-speech, name, song-lyric, formal-noun, phrase. Thanks!

Anonymous

Oh, thank you!

Earthliŋ

Hm...

Anonymous

I wasn't in chat for a few weeks, so it might not have pinged me.

Earthliŋ

No worries, they're all pluralized now

Anonymous

Yay!

Anonymous

4:50 PM

Have we gotten them all now? All the singular tags

Earthliŋ

I think so

We can call it a day =)

Anonymous

I changed passive to passive-voice

Anonymous

Yesterday

Earthliŋ

good

Anonymous

My personal preference is just for passives, following Geoffrey Pullum (who doesn't bother with the "voice" term), but I think most people are familiar with the term passive voice

Earthliŋ

4:52 PM

3

Q: Sentence ending with こと or もの

I'm reading a mathematics textbook, and there are a number of sentences which end with もの or こと. I can work out the intended meaning no problem, so what I would like explained to me, are the rules for when I can use this grammatical construction. This seems to happen in definitions, especially...

sentence-final-particles

that should be a different tag

Anonymous

Why should it be a different tag?

Earthliŋ

are こと and もの sentence-final-particles?

Anonymous

Well, they are sometimes.

Anonymous

You can tell because of things like 〜だもの

Earthliŋ

Are they in the context of the question?

Anonymous

4:55 PM

Hmm, maybe not!

Anonymous

I think the examples in that question look more like ellipsis

Anonymous

There's a lot of syntactic overlap between the two uses, which is how it was possible for them to be reanalyzed as 終助詞 in the first place

Anonymous

So you have to look at semantics, and this is not like だって、〜〜だもの in terms of meaning

Anonymous

It could be under nominalization instead

Anonymous

Okay, I edited it!

Anonymous

5:05 PM

I added nominalization and mathematics

Anonymous

And removed sentence-final-particles

Anonymous

It's interesting that we have a tag for 終助詞, but not for 格助詞・並立助詞・間投助詞・準体助詞・副助詞

Anonymous

There's a nascent tag for 取り立て助詞・・・

Earthliŋ

5:30 PM

@snailboat That's your doing, I assume?

Anonymous

6:51 PM

We've got translations on most of the tags now! :-)

Anonymous

I don't know what to put for some of them, like word-requests

Anonymous

Or archaic. This one says:

Anonymous

> Archaic language is generally still understood and considered correct, but is not normally used in speech or writing. This distinguishes archaic-language from classical-japanese, which includes words and constructions no longer widely understood in Modern Japanese.

Anonymous

I'm not sure 古語 fits that description precisely...?

Anonymous

Well, we can always change the description...

Anonymous

6:55 PM

I'm not sure it's an accurate description of what people mean when they say "archaic" in English.

Anonymous

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language just says:

Anonymous

> An old word or phrase no longer in general spoken or written use.

Earthliŋ

Who put 古語?

Anonymous

No one, but I was thinking of putting 古語 there and changing the description

Earthliŋ

Ah, ok.

Maybe [archaisms] is better after all?

Anonymous

6:59 PM

I don't think there's a significant difference in meaning

Anonymous

> 古語. Old words or phrases no longer in general spoken or written use.

Anonymous

I put ダジャレ for "puns". Wikipedia uses kanji, but it looks like katakana is a little more common

Anonymous

駄洒落　　　170423
ダジャレ　　321552
だじゃれ　　92452

Earthliŋ

I put カタカナ and ひらがな as well

but Wikipedia uses kanji

Anonymous

I like カタカナ and ひらがな :-)

Anonymous

7:06 PM

It's hard to resist writing them in themselves.

Anonymous

Oh, hey, look how strange this looks by comparison: かたかな and ヒラガナ

Earthliŋ

=)

and ことわざ

not 諺

Anonymous

I actually see the kanji for ことわざ used a fair bit, but I still put it in kana

Earthliŋ

for this Wikipedia uses kana, actually

ことわざ

ことわざ（諺、英語：proverb、ラテン語：proverbium）とは、鋭い風刺や教訓・知識などを含んだ、世代から世代へと言い伝えられてきた簡潔な言葉のことである。俚諺（りげん）ともいう。 == 概要 == ことわざは、観察と経験そして知識の共有によって、長い時間をかけて形成されたものである。その多くは簡潔で覚えやすく、言い得て妙であり、ある一面の真実を鋭く言い当てている。そのため、詳細な説明の代わりとして、あるいは、説明や主張に説得力を持たせる効果的手段として用いられることが多い。慣用句と重なる部分もあるが、一般の文の中でその一部として用いられるものを慣用句といい、文の形をとるか、または簡潔ながら文に相当する意味を表すものをことわざというのが普通である。 == 地域と文化 == ことわざは、その文化に属する者の思考に、意識的あるいは無意識的な影響を及ぼす。ヨーロッパのそれぞれの文化のことわざは非常に似通っている。一方、異なる文化の間でも同等の意味を持つことわざ・慣用句があることも多い。例えば、「船頭多くして船山に登る」と "Too many cooks spoil the broth."（コックが多すぎてスープが出来損なう）、「覆水盆に返らず」（中国語: 覆水難收）と "It is no use crying over spilt milk." （こぼれた乳につ...

Anonymous

The NHK漢字表記辞典 says to put ことわざ in kana

Anonymous

7:13 PM

irregularities-exceptions ← 変格？

Anonymous

Irregular conjugation is 変格活用

Anonymous

Most of those questions are about irregular verbs, but not all

Anonymous

26

Q: Why are the particles "は" (ha⇒wa), "へ" (he⇒e), and "を" (wo⇒o) not spelled phonetically?

As far as I know only three words (or particles) have irregular, non-phonetic spelling in Japanese: "は" - The topic particle is pronounced "wa" but the kana is otherwise pronounced "ha" "へ" - The movement towards particle is pronounced "e" but the kana is otherwise pronounced "h" "を" - The kana...

particles pronunciation hiragana irregularities-exceptions

Anonymous

14

Q: Exceptional compounding forms

There are a number of Japanese words which have distinct compounding forms: -a/-e alternation: 天・雨、酒、上、風、目 — many examples. -u/-i alternation: 神（[神]{かむ}[集]{つど}ふ）、月（[月]{つく}[読]{よみ}） -o/-i alternation: 木（[木]{こ}の[葉]{は}）、火（炎【ほのほ】） -a/-o alternation: 白（[白]{しら}[雪]{ゆき}） This BBS post has more example...

etymology history phonology compounds irregularities-exceptions

Anonymous

I don't have a really good feel for the word 変格 in Japanese

Anonymous

7:15 PM

Not sure what to do with that tag

Anonymous

The other word that comes to mind is 変則

Anonymous

To be honest, I think I've only seen 変格 in the context of irregular verbs

Anonymous

Is it strange to use it for anything else?

Anonymous

Oh well, I'll leave that one for someone else to translate :-)

Earthliŋ

Sorry, I don't know either.

Anonymous

7:24 PM

I should post it as a question on the site, but I'm feeling kind of lazy at the moment. I might do it later :-)

Earthliŋ

Eventually we can make a new meta post for the last tags

Anonymous

I think sometimes our tags might not be well-defined enough in English to come up with distinct translations for all of them

Anonymous

The questions in slang, colloquial-language, and spoken-language do all seem somewhat distinct

Anonymous

俗語・口語・話し言葉？

Anonymous

I feel a little bit weird using 口語 and 話し言葉 that way

Anonymous

7:31 PM

That's the best I've got for those three at the moment :-)

Anonymous

I put 日本語学習 rather than just 学習 for 'learning'

Anonymous

For 'politeness', the meta post says 礼儀. There's also 礼儀正しさ or possibly 丁寧

Anonymous

The translation script says 丁寧さ

Anonymous

I guess that's literally 'politeness'

Anonymous

For 'orthography', 仮名遣い isn't quite right. Orthography isn't limited to kana.

Anonymous

7:41 PM

My feeling is that 綴り is like English 'spelling' and tends to be used for Latin letters, not for Japanese script.

Anonymous

The parallel holds there, since people rarely talk use the term 'spelling' to describe how things are written in kana. (I'm not sure why not!)

Anonymous

So 正書法 seems like the best choice.

Anonymous

Okay, that's enough for now. We've made some good progress on the tags! :-)

Anonymous

Eventually, it might be fun to try to flesh out the tag wikis and make them a useful resource.

Anonymous

Right now, there's really no reason to click a tag wiki and read the detailed description.

Anonymous

7:49 PM

And even if we did fill a lot of them in, people probably wouldn't click them very often.

Anonymous

But we could start linking to them sometimes. :-)

Earthliŋ

@snailboat I think 綴り is also used for 送仮名 etc.

Jun 9 at 19:36, by broccoli forest

@Earthliŋ 「正書法」は硬い言葉です（ほとんど学術用語）、日常会話では「綴り」とか、日本語に限って言えば「かなづかい」とか「漢字の使い方」、「表記の基準」とか…

Anonymous

Kinda like English orthography.

Earthliŋ

That's what I was thinking

Anonymous

It could make sense to have a 仮名遣い tag.

Anonymous

8:01 PM

We have some questions about 歴史的仮名遣い already

Earthliŋ

Would Hepburn be kanazukai or kanaduzai?

I guess the former

senshin

@snailboat I just migrated japanese.stackexchange.com/q/25450 in from Anime.SE.

Does the question look okay to you as it is, or would you like me to make any additional edits to it?

Anonymous

@senshin Thanks! :-) I don't see any other site-specific edits that need to be made

Anonymous

I'm amused by "I've only watched around 50 different anime shows", which I'd think would be a large number even for Anime.SE users :-)

Anonymous

8:18 PM

@Earthliŋ Yeah. Did you mean to type kanadzukai for the second choice?

Anonymous

dzu was only used briefly in Hepburn around a hundred years ago, but it's preserved in the loanword kudzu in English

Anonymous

Sometimes learners still learn dzu and spell it that way, although it's not part of any system in common use. I think the idea that tsu becomes dzu makes sense in an intuitive way to some people.

senshin

@snailboat Actually, I was wondering about that - the English loanword is from 葛, right? It's spelled くず these days; was it くづ in the past?

Anonymous

Yes, it was くづ in 歴史的仮名遣い, and it was borrowed into English in the 1890s, before the spelling reforms took place in Japan [EDIT: See below, this is mistaken]

Anonymous

But it was already pronounced like くず at that point, despite the spelling

senshin

8:25 PM

Do you know of any online dictionaries that have good 歴史的仮名遣い info? I mostly use goo辞書/デジタル大辞泉, which sometimes has 歴史的仮名遣い included in its entries, but for 葛, it doesn't have anything listed.

Anonymous

Just a moment

Anonymous

I think I made a mistake

Anonymous

I accidentally looked up 屑, which has くづ listed

Anonymous

When I look up 葛 in my 古語辞典 I see くず, not くづ

Anonymous

Ah!

Anonymous

8:27 PM

I see.

Anonymous

ず was also written dzu in that version of Hepburn romanization

Anonymous

That explains it.

senshin

Huh. That's kinda weird. Cool!

Anonymous

That version of Hepburn romanization wasn't used for very long, I believe

Anonymous

Basically, they're the romanization schemes he used in the different editions of A Japanese-English and English-Japanese dictionary

Anonymous

8:34 PM

Those are public domain, so you can look them up if you like :-)

Anonymous

What people call "revised Hepburn" is likewise based on the system used in Kenkyūsha's New Japanese-English Dictionary

Anonymous

(But people do all sorts of stuff with romanization, and I apparently can't keep track of all the systems in my head! :-)

senshin

Looks like the version on Archive.org (archive.org/details/japaneseenglishe00hepbuoft; pub. 1888) uses "Kuzu" (p. 355), so I guess it must've been an older version that used ず = "dzu".

Anonymous

The 1873 edition

Earthliŋ

8:49 PM

@snailboat In English I see aduki azuki and adzuki beans

Anonymous

@Earthliŋ Wow! A trifecta!

Earthliŋ

And they're all stressed on the second syllable, so...

Anonymous

The OED lists a number of spellings, starting with atsuki and adsuki in the 1700s and 1800s.

Anonymous

In 1889, they show the first cite for adzuki, possibly due to Hepburn?

Anonymous

And in 1976 they give their first cite for the spelling azuki in English

Anonymous

8:52 PM

I don't know where the spelling aduki comes from. (Presumably not directly from あづき?)

Earthliŋ

In Japanese it's often あづき, so I'm assuming it comes from Japanese manufacturers

which use 訓令式

Anonymous

9:28 PM

In 訓令式, づ is zu

Anonymous

訓令式 is basically a phonemic romanization system, not including new phonemes appearing in Japanese due to loanwords in recent years

Anonymous

So it has the expected づ /zu/ ぢ /zi/ を /o/

Anonymous

mext.go.jp/b_menu/hakusho/nc/k19541209001/k19541209001.html

Anonymous

That's in chart 1, anyway

Anonymous

They allow du as an exception

Anonymous

9:33 PM

Which is shown in chart 2

Anonymous

But then it's no longer phonemic...

Anonymous

Atsuki, adsuki, adzuki, aduki, azuki

Earthliŋ

10:41 PM

@snailboat Oh, I see. I can never remember all the romanizations...

I remember the 食堂 at my university in Japan using ワープロローマ字 including nn for ん...

Anonymous

@Earthliŋ Me either, really :-)

Anonymous

I know a lot of native speakers tend not to care too much about different romanization schemes

Anonymous

Though some do!

Earthliŋ

I hope no one cares too much that we don't use n' in our tags

I know Dono doesn't like it

Anonymous

Well, we don't have a choice at the moment.

Earthliŋ

10:47 PM

I mean I think he prefers to write the apostrophe

Anonymous

I understood

Earthliŋ

Oh, macrons are ok, but apostrophes are not?

Anonymous

Unless they've changed the system since I was last aware, we can't enter apostrophes

Earthliŋ

for tags i mean?

i see

Anonymous

6

Q: Apostrophes in tag names: renyōkei vs. ren'yōkei

Right now, the renyōkei tag doesn't have an apostrophe. In fact, the tag engine doesn't seem to allow us to put one there. But the official guidelines for romanization suggest putting one in: はねる音を表わすnと次にくる母音字またはyとを切り離す必要がある場合には、nの次に’を入れる。 The apostrophe is also part of the official roman...

feature-request

Earthliŋ

10:48 PM

I kind of prefer it without apostrophe

but that's just because i don't like apostrophes in words

Anonymous

Writing systems tend to be underspecified anyway.

Earthliŋ

apostrophes as a sort of diacritic i mean

Anonymous

e.g. Japanese not showing pitch accent

Earthliŋ

I also don't like apostrophes in Russian names, like Arnol'd

or Gel'fand

Anonymous

A lot of Irish names have O', which is based on a misunderstanding of Ó

Anonymous

10:53 PM

My family is Irish

Anonymous

Irish and German

Anonymous

and Russian

Anonymous

Japanese is undergoing the phonemicization of a number of sounds from loanwords

Earthliŋ

@snailboat I didn't know that

Anonymous

The traditional system - The new system

Earthliŋ

10:56 PM

Irish, German, Russian... sounds very white =)

Anonymous

My skin is very pale.

Earthliŋ

easily sunburned?

Anonymous

Yeah. Oddly enough, I don't tan, I just burn.

Earthliŋ

Well, that was to be expected

Anonymous

So 訓令式, which was designed before the phonemicization began, is a good phonemic romanization system for the traditional system

Anonymous

10:58 PM

But is inadequate to capture all the contrasts made in modern loanwords and such

Anonymous

For example, most speakers can now distinguish ティ and チ

Earthliŋ

@snailboat like ファミリー

Anonymous

ハミリー

Earthliŋ

=)

Anonymous

Vance considers all of the non-traditional sounds to have full phonemic status already

Earthliŋ

11:00 PM

ヴィオラ?

Anonymous

It seems to me it would be better to say they're in the process of gradually becoming phonemic, but of course he's the expert and I'm not :-)

Anonymous

Oh, not /v/

Anonymous

I don't think people generally consider /v/ to have phonemic status, even in the new system

Anonymous

Although there are some speakers who pronounce a v sound of some sort

Anonymous

You can see Irwin put that in parentheses

Anonymous

11:03 PM

So the question is, how do you transcribe the new system phonemically? What sort of transcription system do you use?

Anonymous

訓令式 is great as long as you're discussing, say, Japanese verbal morphology

Chris

11:45 PM

I am a bit confused。 Makimono's example for "to take a shower" reads シャワーを浴びる．This doesn't make any sense as no one bathes a shower. Shouldn't it read シャワーで浴びる。To bathe by way of the shower?

Anonymous

You're making it so that the shower rains down upon you

Anonymous

From 明鏡: ①液体が自分の体に注ぎかかるようにする。「頭から冷水を浴びる」「シャワーを浴びる」

Anonymous

The way it's conceptualized is not exactly the same as English bathe, I think

Chris

It just doesn't make sense as the shower is not the direct object but rather the means of bathing.

Earthliŋ

光を浴びる is used, too, but then in English you can say "bathe in sunlight"...

Anonymous

11:49 PM

Well, it is the direct object.

Anonymous

Compare it to, say, かぶる

Chris

Ok, I can just accept it as a different conceptualization. Still don't see it as the D.O.

Room for Choko and l'électeur

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