Japanese Language

1:10 PM

Are the ads enabled? We now have two ads with the necessary 6 votes, but I've never seen any (and nobody has clicked an ad)...

4:18 PM

Curious: what do people think of the sentence 信号を右へ曲がる?

Usual uses of that を like 空を飛ぶ and 廊下を走る both have "spaces" which you go "go through" as the object.

But 信号 is just a traffic light -- and in my head more like a barrier/line than a space with area. Or do native speakers imagine it as an area which you turn through?

(An actual full sentence: あの信号を右へ曲がってください。)

A: How 「えい」 should be pronounced in the words like 英語, 先生, etc?

@DariusJahandarie 信号を曲がる is a quite common phrase, I don't know other ways to say it

@DariusJahandarie hmm... indeed. I think they mean the whole intersection by 信号

don't we say "the third traffic light"?

as in: "turn left at the third traffic light"

20

Short answer: The allowed pronunciations depends somewhat on the word origin. For Sino-Japanese words (漢語), such as 英語<えいご> or 先生<せんせい>, the underlying vowel sequence is always ええ, but can be pronounced as either えい or ええ (despite its native orthography being <えい>). Most Yamato (和語) words are t...

> the Yamato word 姪 has kana <めい> but either pronunciation [eː] or [ei]

姪 pronounced as めえ sounds very very weird imo

the same applies to えい and 鰈

5:09 PM

@broccoliforest Interesting!

@broccoliforest Yeah -- but in English the way I visualize it is that the traffic light is a point, not a space. You turn when you reach that point.

"Turn" is instantaneous in that interpretation, I guess.

(It's not that you start turning at the point or finish turning at the point, you just turn.)

(Of course there are gradual interpretations of "turn" as well, but for that you'd say something like "Start turning at the white line before the traffic light, and stop turning once you reach the double yellow lines.")

I take it's a gradual turn in the Japanese? Since it's an area which you're turning through.

(Also, paging @snailboat for better terminology :P)

Anonymous

6:02 PM

She's not wrong, she just said it so there wouldn't be any further complexions. I'm sure she knows of it. — RnBandCrunk 3 hours ago

Anonymous

??

@snailboat I think they're using "wrong" as "doesn't understand"/"doesn't know" instead of "said something not true".

Also, probably binding "she" to the teacher, not the answer writer.

complexions -> questions, I reckon

or "making things more complicated"

Oh, I was reading that as complications.

yes, that's one possibility I thought of

6:09 PM

(Today in Interpreting Poorly Written Comments on the Internet...)

Anonymous

That actually helped a lot, thanks :-)

I think "は only once in a sentence" is a perfectly fine rule for beginners, by the way.

the rule was probably 'taught' at a Japanese 101 class.

Anonymous

It sounds like a "baby rule"—rules for beginners that don't actually hold but help people form sentences early on.

Anonymous

I'm not sure how it helps, though.

I think a lot of people who wander by the site understand it as something like a "Japanese Learners Forum", where learners discuss Japanese. Which isn't entirely wrong, but that perspective also suggests that learner-opinion-type answers would be fine (like they would be on say, a normal forum), while in reality, at least recently, we've been rather strict on answers being both correct and well-written.

6:15 PM

A lot of (monolingual?) students don't seem to even know what a subject or an object is, so anything that simplifies the material probably does not hurt.

Makes the material rather dull for those of us who understand (very) basic linguistics though.

It'd be interesting if a prerequisite for foreign language courses was like linguistics 101 or 100 or something like that. Just to go over the basic concepts in English.

Not everyone finds hardcore linguistics helpful for learning foreign languages (in fact I think most people don't), but I think the very basics are probably useful and helpful to everyone.

I think those things get taught in elementary school but nobody pays any attention then.

Very poorly, though.

And who remembers what they learned in elementary school? :)

Anonymous

I remember what they tried to teach me in elementary school. A lot of it was wrong, and I knew it even at the time :-)

Anonymous

I don't think my elementary school was very good.

6:27 PM

I don't really remember much except that we watched Con Air once.

The only non-family-oriented film we got to watch.

@broccoliforest That's because めい should be 和語 (presumably 女【め】 + something?). Same for えい and 鰈, right? I think that /ei/ = [e:] should only be true for 漢語.

I tried watching it a couple of years ago and I couldn't get past the half-hour mark because its plot hurt my head so much...

Anonymous

There's a morpheme boundary in me-i and o-i

Anonymous

At least historically speaking

Anonymous

Although Vance says that for /ei/ versus /eH/, that if there is a difference depending on whether there's a morpheme boundary, it isn't very robust…

6:40 PM

@snailboat do you know what i is?

Anonymous

I'm not sure, it was -pi in Old Japanese

Right. What's -pi =)

Anonymous

Even if you rephrase the question, I still don't know :-)

I think I might ask this on main. I'm sure at least one user knows the answer =)

7:00 PM

@snailboat Do you know of any words with a morpheme boundary that are pronounced [e:]?

Anonymous

@Earthliŋ Well, in rapid speech words with an [ei] sequence might become [eː]

Anonymous

Let me type up something from Vance

Thank you for the edit =)

Anonymous

> It's often claimed that a morpheme division between the two vowels in /ei/ inhibits the pronunciation [eː] (Maeda 1971:172, Kindaichi and Akinaga 2001:25(front matter), Kubozono and Honma 2002:14). If so, [eː] would be less likely in meisha 'eye doctor' than in a word like meishi 名士 'celebrity', which has a morpheme division between mei 'fame' and shi 'person' and clearly has only two syllables: mei.shi.

Anonymous

> Many native speakers are skeptical about this purported difference in the likelihood of [eː] depending on whether or not there's a morpheme break between /e/ and /i/. If there really is a difference, it's not very robust.

Anonymous

7:09 PM

(Vance 2008 p.67)

@DariusJahandarie that's what I visualize too!

maybe my wording was bad, I thought the 信号 is kind of locational thing anyway

@Earthliŋ 比べ得ない、耐え得ない、求め得ない etc.

but they're hiatus of course...

Anonymous

Oh, I assumed he meant words where the second vowel is spelled with い in kana

oh :0

not in 和語 I guess

Yes, that's what I meant. Sorry for the confusion. I didn't know how to write エ欄 + イ generally.

"e+イ"

7:15 PM

Ok, e+イ

What do you call a row in the 五十音? 列?

Anonymous

え・け・せ etc are エ段

Anonymous

But it's less effort to type e :-)

aha!

Anonymous

え段

え段（えだん）とは、五十音図において、上から4番目の段（第4段）である。え、け、せ、て、ね、へ、め、(え)、れ、ゑから成る。どの音にも、母音/e/が含まれる。あ段 - い段 - う段 - え段 - お段...

Anonymous

What's confusing to me is when people write things like "end in い" but they mean "end in i"

Anonymous

7:18 PM

歩き ends in i but it doesn't end in い

Anonymous

(They must think about kana differently than I do)

obviously everyone hates to type 段 (includes me)

Anonymous

Hehe!

Anonymous

It's cumbersome

@snailboat Right, it's whether they're thinking in characters or in sounds. Careful people use イ (or even better /i/) for the latter, but I think it's not too surprising that not everyone is careful.

7:31 PM

it seems clear that 甥 and 姪 came from wo+pi and me+pi

but the pi is too vague to trace further... it only has one syllable

maybe related to piko 彦

and 曾孫 himago, which doesn't seem to be attested in oldest documents

piko 彦 and pime 姫

Anonymous

I don't like the word nephros, it seems creepy

Anonymous

like in nephrologist

"kidney" sounds yummy, but "nephros" doesn't

Anonymous

It reminds me of necros

Anonymous

I asked a question about the ま in ひざまずく once. People posted a bunch of speculation :-) It was fun

7:58 PM

@snailboat my 古語辞典 doesn't have an entry ひざまづく

it instead has ひざまく

"lie/lay on one's lap"

Anonymous

That's what I see when I check 旺文社

I didn't know that was a good old Japanese tradition...

8:13 PM

Has anyone seen any of our community ads on our main page?

Anonymous

I think Darius got them to show up!

Hm...

where? on questions?

Anonymous

When I look at this page in Chrome, I see auto-generated ads for random questions on random sites, and occasionally Area 51 ads.

Anonymous

I have yet to see the resources ad show up, though!

Anonymous

Has anyone seen these ads show up anywhere? — snailboat ♦ just now

Anonymous

8:25 PM

The ELL ads have a very small # of clicks, but non-zero: meta.ell.stackexchange.com/ads/display/2635