@snailboat Is there an "overview of Japanese linguistics" somewhere? As in the different schools and main names associated with the schools.

(Or have you just slowly put the picture together yourself over time?)

I see.

I'd be interesting in hearing what you have to say, if you were interested in writing something short up.

Nice! Thanks for the summary and references.

Has anyone told you that you're awesome, btw? :)

There is no place for letters in books.

I guess my feeling is that since you need to get used to seeing basically every word written in at least 3 different ways anyways, adding more with romaji doesn't really matter much.

I sometimes use romaji when tracking etymological shifts to make things more apparent

Or in establishing patterns (e.g. suwaru vs. suweru for transitive/intransitive pairs, where the base form is in the W column, but the other is rendered as え since ゑ has been deprecated)

That said, I tend to avoid using romaji unless there is a true necessity for it for some reason or another.

grumble... whenever you are looking for "a comprehensive list of words fulfilling criteria X", the answer is usually "a dictionary"

Yeah, but they can be pretty good at a lot of these questions... particularly if "comprehensive" is actually a requirement

(occasionally you need to know a bit of coding... but still)

I assumed as much

@snailboat True, the distinction may have been lost, but etymologically it's still there, which is what I'm trying to reflect when I do that. I've also done similar sometimes for Y column syllables (due to the ゆ verbs in classical Japanese), or situations where a logical /wu/ is rendered as ふ due to the absence of the kana (and its corresponding sound) altogether

Along those lines, yeah

Sometimes I drop the dash if I'm planning to do string analysis on a set of words to identify patterns

But in the end the important point in this case is to preserve the presence of the stem, as you illustrated

@snailboat I got access to a copy of Martin's book recently. It is quite dense isn't it? There is a lot in there but it is it easy to use?

Okay... what exactly is the problem being solved here?

@jkerian Took a stab at it.

Yeah, it would have been really convenient for doing what he wanted. I wasn't going to bother with preformatted text, though

In the end it worked out fine, though, because as you see towards the end not everything takes the additional particles. So in that regard it allowed me to put the comments inline instead of making him look for them at the end.

I put all of them down that came to mind off the top of my head; feel free to comment with missing ones and I'll add them in, though

I debated touching on こそあど, but decided to stick to ど since he's explicitly asking about interrogatives

Good catch

Guess sometimes things don't occur to you often until you need them. hehehe...

どなた、どう、and いかが clearly belong on the list, same for どいつ and どっち . The other ones might be a bit too archaic. Hmmm...

Eh, what the heck, it's not properly done until it's overdone.

Ah! Knew I missed one!

I knew どれ was for 3 or more, but couldn't remember the one for just two choices offhand

Thinking about it, どちら almost deserves its own section

It can be "which one", "which way", polite "where", polite "who"....

True

In the end it gets down to how much is appropriate, I guess

Yep

I'm also adding an explanation to the top with the general pattern the words follow before we get into the specific demonstrations; that should free up some more room for adding notes

All right, updated and done. Will do minor updates as pointed out, but the list is probably exhaustive enough for their needs.

slaps forehead

adds

All right, good to go now.

On an aside, it's amazing how many question words Japanese does have, especially when in English we tend to just think of it as 5W+H to cover all needs.

And a lot of specific types of questions we ask by adding qualifiers (e.g. "How" is a different question from "How many")

that's a whale of a wh-list

@snailboat Good point on the cross-linguistic tendencies regarding irregular verbs. In the end I imagine it largely has to do with the fact that if the words come up rarely the patterns are less likely to be remembered, no?

how utterly bemusing

I'm still not sure if I should correct Japanese speakers when they say "been" as "bean"...

sorry I'm just commenting on random tangents here