Japanese Language

Anonymous

04:02

@Earthliŋ See, your answer is up to +8. Aren't you glad you didn't delete it? :-)

Anonymous

I like that your answer points out the similarity to a noun.

Anonymous

04:19

@Earthliŋ I just got the research assistant badge: 'edit 50 tag wikis'. I see you've already got this badge. I just joined the club :-)

Anonymous

I found @DariusJahandarie's meta question about how detailed we want to make tag wikis, and I looked at examples of good tag wikis on sites like Stack Overflow. I think I want to try out writing a few (probably fairly short) tag wiki descriptions.

Anonymous

That question was from a while ago, by the way:

Anonymous

5

Q: How in-depth should the tag wiki be?

I've noticed some of the tag wiki entries are only very basic one-line definitions, while others go into some detail and provide examples of the topic. I personally do think that a little extra detail is nice for those looking to understand one of the tags, but how authoritative does that descri...

Anonymous

Speaking of which, I think most of our tags badly need clarification on when they should be applied. Especially the broad ones like "words", "translation", "meaning", and "usage". — Troyen Feb 13 '13 at 23:52

Anonymous

I think the really broad tags are kind of meaningless, though.

Anonymous

04:22

I mean, I'm not sure we could actually do away with very general categories like grammar or meaning (which I interpret as meaning 'semantics and pragmatics').

Anonymous

Just because, well, a lot of questions really do seem to ask "What does this mean?" Things like that.

Anonymous

But it's not really clear when to use them.

Anonymous

I don't have a solution to that problem, though.

Anonymous

@unarist Oh, I forgot to say thank you! I am definitely going to use U+200A ' ' HAIR SPACE now :-)

Anonymous

I added it to my input method dictionary so I can type it whenever I need to.

Anonymous

04:33

I've noticed the topic of Sino-Japanese vocabulary vs native Japanese vocabulary seems to come up a lot. 漢語 versus 大和言葉. I'm sure other people have noticed this as well.

Anonymous

Is there anything we should do to address that? Like, do we have a good canonical post on the topic we can refer to? Should we make a tag? I dunno.

Anonymous

@Earthliŋ I'm feeling better now :-)

chocolate

05:43

@ssb 大丈夫でした？お部屋

ssb

@chocolate define '大丈夫'

chocolate

ううむ・・

住める？

ssb

my apartment? yes

minamiaso village?

chocolate

大雨で、避難指示出てます

ssb

no

chocolate

05:44

あら

ssb

the whole place is an absolute disaster

chocolate

おお・・

ssb

luckily my home had no damage

a lot of buildings are doing ok

but it's the roads

chocolate

水、電気とかは？

店、あるんですか

ssb

my apartment has (had?) power and water

i think because it's next to a building the 自衛隊 are using as headquarters

i drove around the village and i think most places don't have power. some traffic signals still aren't even working

big landslides

half the roads are extremely dangerous to drive on but still open because you can't close EVERY road

chocolate

05:47

危ないです、また大雨だし

ssb

i am in the city again

i was going to return today, but the rain is too much

with the evacuation orders i decided to stay here

i'm going to have to go back permanently this weekend, though, because i have to go back to work

now school is cancelled until may 10th

chocolate

そうですね、今日は、行けないでしょう

今週末？ううむ・・

ssb

the only road i can take to get there is so small and far away

it takes almost 2 hours

because so many cars need to use it

especially 自衛隊

chocolate

混む？

ssb

yes

and only one lane so if one person goes slow everyone goes slow

chocolate

05:50

かなんなあ・・

ssb

and of course big trucks go slow on tiny mountain roads

chocolate

トラックが通れるということは、宅配便とか、もう通ってるんですかね

お店に、物資を運んだり？

ssb

delivery companies are not accepting aso mail yet

chocolate

まだかー

ssb

when i went on tuesday, there was a poor family mart

with no power and almost no supplies

but still open for business

there aren't really stores in minamiaso so it's not easy

i didn't check takamori, but it might be better there

chocolate

05:54

今、お友達のおうちにいるんですか？

たかもり？

ssb

takamori is next to minamiaso

more like a small city

minamiaso is pure inaka

yes now i'm at someone's house in the city

chocolate

何か、必要なものありませんか？

送ります！！！

ssb

i am ok, thank you

in kumamoto city it really isn't so bad

i mean, it's not good but I can survive

chocolate

そう？遠慮しないでね

Lang8にまたメッセ送っときます

忙しくないときに、見てくださいね

ssb

i'm not busy at all today

Anonymous

09:03

@ssb Oh, it's still that bad, huh? :-(

Earthliŋ

12:49

@snailboat Yes, I can see that =) It seems like how well you are is proportional to your number of characters in chat.

Earthliŋ

12:59

I have come across "formal nouns" a couple of times here on J.SE, but apparently they made never sense to me, because I can never remember what they are or why you need them... (Maybe that's because they're not in Wikipedia.) Although if formal nouns are things behaving like nouns and bakari could be a formal noun, maybe I will remember this time =)

broccoli forest

16:26

通れた道マップ toyota.co.jp/jpn/auto/passable_route/map

@snailboat I'm also curious whether regarding or notwithstanding could be other than "preposition" :)

0

A: 音声記号用フォントの single-storey a と double-storey a

On the feasibility of font-feature-settings solution As I tried with the latest version (ver 5.000 at the moment) of Andika and other SIL fonts on Firefox 45.0.2, I have found the font-feature-settings property does work but has its own limitation due to font implementations. According to the d...

というわけなのでやっぱりAndikaは鬼門

broccoli forest

18:22

0

Q: What is N+できる grammar?

Consider the following two sentences. A:　僕は左と右が区別できない。 B:　僕は左と右を区別することができない。 I often see B but just know A now. How can A be possible? What kind of grammar is A? Edit The following sentence (taken from romajidesu.com) inspired me to ask this question.

grammar

もしかしてこの人、「が」区別できないと「を」区別することができないの違いを聞いてる？

kuchitsu

18:43

i.imgur.com/HYofNw3.png Hmmm, does she mean her parents' 姪っ子? Because obviously she's too young to have one.

broccoli forest

maybe, but it's possible that her sibling already has chidren

kuchitsu

OH, right. these relations always confuse me

especially the stuff about once removed, etc

broccoli forest

@kuchitsu do you mean definition in Japanese or the story's plot?

kuchitsu

19:02

Just in general. When I hear "niece" I can't fully grasp the meaning until I vizualise it in my head like "okay, so this person has sister, and that sister has a daughter, and that's the niece". Always confuses me x_x

broccoli forest

yeah, and theoretically a niece could be older than you (not likely in present-day Japan though)

> From Middle English nece ‎(“niece, granddaughter”), from Old French nece ‎(“niece, granddaughter”) (Modern French nièce ‎(“niece”)) from Vulgar Latin *neptia, representing Latin neptis ‎(“granddaughter”), from Proto-Indo-European *nepot- ‎(“grandchild, sister's son”). Akin to Old High German nift ‎(“niece, granddaughter”) (German Nichte ‎(“niece”)). Displaced native Middle English nifte ‎(“niece, granddaughter”) (from Old English nift ‎(“niece, granddaughter”)).

"niece, granddaughter"...

kuchitsu

hmm

kuchitsu

21:06

heh ok, that question about 午前\午後 is even more confusing

gotta be careful with these words

Anonymous

22:33

@broccoliforest Oh! That's a very fun topic.

Anonymous

Native speakers of English tend to be surprised when they find out words like notwithstanding are classified as prepositions in dictionaries.

Anonymous

They do, after all, look like verbs.

Anonymous

But English has deverbal adjectives and deverbal prepositions derived from both participial forms of verbs (-ing and -ed).

Anonymous

Sometimes they're clearly verb forms:

Anonymous

> 1. It was broken deliberately, out of spite. [past participle form of verb]

Anonymous

22:36

But sometimes we can tell they're not:

Anonymous

> 2. It didn't look broken to me. 　　　　　 [past-participial adjective]

Anonymous

And sometimes, we can't tell the difference:

Anonymous

> 3. It was broken.　　　　　　　　　　　　[ambiguous]

Anonymous

(The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, p.79)

Anonymous

So what grounds do we have for distinguishing a participial verb form from a deverbal adjective or a deverbal preposition?

Anonymous

22:39

Well, you can look at the semantics, but there are a bunch of syntactic differences, often tied to those semantic differences.

Anonymous

One of the easiest ones is gradability. If it's gradable, it's an adjective:

Anonymous

> I found that very surprising. / I was very surprised.

Anonymous

Compare:

Anonymous

> *He was very surprising me. / *He very surprised me.

Anonymous

But not all adjectives are gradable. Generally, we want to come up with as many tests as we can, and look at the results of all of them to figure out if something patterns like one word class or another.

Anonymous

22:43

And there are always words like worth that don't pattern much like any class, so you have to either describe them on their own, or pick the class you think is nearest and describe the ways in which it's exceptional.

Anonymous

Now, if we look at a deverbal preposition like given, why would we consider that a preposition?

Anonymous

The main reason is that, if they're verbs, we expect them to predicate on the main clause.

Anonymous

> Seeing an accident ahead, I stopped my car.

Anonymous

Here, seeing semantically predicates on the main clause subject I.

Anonymous

When English speakers hear a participial clause like this, they expect it to predicate on a subject recoverable from the matrix clause.

Anonymous

22:47

This expectation isn't always met, but when it's not, it's often called a "dangling participle", and sometimes it can be rather confusing.

Anonymous

But there are forms that look morphologically like verbs, but for which we don't have any such expectation.

Anonymous

> Given his age, a shorter prison sentence is appropriate.

Anonymous

In this example, there's no subject–predicate relationship.

Anonymous

And so traditionally, it's classified as a deverbal preposition, one derived from a verb form but no longer a verb form.

Anonymous

It's not really as clear as all that, though.

Anonymous

22:51

When prescriptive grammarians talk about "dangling participles", they condemn examples that many speakers find acceptable like the following:

Anonymous

> Turning now to sales, there are very optimistic signs.

Anonymous

> Bearing in mind the competitive environment, this is a creditable result.

Anonymous

> Having said that, it must be admitted that the new plan also has advantages.

Anonymous

(CGEL p.611)

Anonymous

Unlike the example above with given, the participial forms turning, bearing, and having do seem to have a semantic subject–predicate relationship. In each case, the subject is recoverable from the discourse context, but not from the matrix clause.

Anonymous

22:53

These are prescriptively condemned as "dangling participles", but they appear too widely in published and edited Standard English to be considered ungrammatical.

Anonymous

The strongest evidence, of course, is that many speakers find them perfectly acceptable.

Anonymous

And these are clearly not prepositions. In having said that, for having to be a preposition would require us to set up a new kind of complement for prepositions – no preposition takes an obligatory past-participial complement.

Anonymous

We can use tests to see if something's a verb, too. For example, we can contrast -ing verb forms ("gerunds") with deverbal nouns derived from those gerunds:

Anonymous

> He was expelled for wantonly killing the birds.

Anonymous

Here, we have an -ing form. We can't make it plural:

Anonymous

22:56

> *He was expelled for wantonly killings the birds.

Anonymous

We can't give it a determiner:

Anonymous

> *He was expelled for the wantonly killing the birds.

Anonymous

We can't give it adjectival modification:

Anonymous

> *He was expelled for wanton killings the birds.

Anonymous

And we can't give it an of-PP complement:

Anonymous

22:57

> *He was expelled for wantonly killing of the birds.

Anonymous

In other words, within the constituent wantonly killing the birds, the word killing still behaves like a verb form. It takes adverbial modification, no determiner, takes a direct object, doesn't inflect like a noun, and so forth.

Anonymous

This is what would traditionally be called a gerund; the constituent as a whole is distributionally very similar to a noun phrase.

Anonymous

But we can still see that killing here is a verb form, not a noun form.

Anonymous

Now compare:

Anonymous

> He was expelled for the wanton killings of the birds.

Anonymous

22:59

We've just derived a deverbal noun from killing.

Anonymous

It takes a determiner, takes the plural inflection -s, takes adjectival but not adverbial modification, and takes an of-PP rather than a direct object.

Anonymous

Each word class has its own characteristics we can use to come up with tests like these to determine whether they belong. Depending on the example, killing could belong to the verb class or the noun class.

Anonymous

Likewise, given could belong to the preposition class or the verb class.

Anonymous

Let's try applying one of these tests to given.

Anonymous

> Given his age, a shorter prison sentence is appropriate.

Anonymous

23:00

Earlier I claimed this was a preposition on the grounds that it has no predicand.

Anonymous

Let's try giving it adverbial modification:

Anonymous

> *Quickly given his age, a shorter prison sentence is appropriate.

Anonymous

When you read it now, by the time you get to the end of the bold portion, you expect a main clause subject that will somehow make it make sense.

Anonymous

The adverb forces you to interpret it as a verb form instead, and there is no subject recoverable from the main clause, and certainly no subject recoverable from context (as I haven't given you any!) to make it make sense.

Anonymous

It's hard to imagine a context that would make it work.

Anonymous

23:03

We have to admit some deverbal prepositions on distributional grounds.

Anonymous

In fact, there are some deverbal prepositions that clearly differ from the verbs they're derived from in terms of meaning, because the two have drifted apart over time.

Anonymous

And during, notwithstanding, and pending aren't homonymous with verb forms.

Anonymous

Your example, notwithstanding, is doubly exceptional.

Anonymous

In English, the adposition class is generally called the "preposition" class because complements almost always follow their heads.

Anonymous

But notwithstanding can follow or precede its complement:

Anonymous

23:07

> Notwithstanding these objections, they pressed ahead with their proposal.

Anonymous

> These objections notwithstanding, they pressed ahead with their proposal.

Anonymous

Aside and apart also fit in this category, and ago and on always follow their complements (ten years ago, ten years on).

Anonymous

So occasionally you'll find people who call ago a postposition, and say notwithstanding can be a preposition or a postposition.

Anonymous

The authors of CGEL use the term preposition for all of these, though, rather than adposition or postposition.

Anonymous

They argue that preposition should be treated as etymologically opaque, the same way we use the term adverb while ignoring its etymology.

Anonymous

23:11

In any case, notwithstanding is definitely a strange example, as it is unusually morphologically (it's compounded with a negator!) and syntactically (it can precede or follow its complement), but if you look at it in terms of function and modification, it does appear to fit into the preposition category.

Anonymous

One other problem is that some words which otherwise pattern like prepositions take complements other than noun phrases.

Anonymous

The great Otto Jespersen saw that the traditional definition of preposition was too restrictive a hundred years ago.

Anonymous

By the traditional definition, a preposition must precede its complement (object) and always takes a complement (is always transitive).

Anonymous

But this definition makes grammar more complicated than it needs to be.

Anonymous

In traditional English grammar, we have a needless alternation between homophonous adverbs and prepositions. When they're transitive, we call them prepositions; when they're intransitive, we call them adverbs.

Anonymous

23:15

But they don't pattern anything like the rest of the adverb class. They pattern like prepositions. So why?

Anonymous

Imagine if we lumped all intransitive verbs in the adverb category.

Anonymous

Why? Because we have an arbitrary rule saying verbs must be transitive and take objects as complements.

Anonymous

Anything that doesn't, isn't a verb by definition.

Anonymous

It would be silly! And the same thing goes for classifying intransitive prepositions as adverbs.

Anonymous

Modern grammarians consider prepositions as selecting different kinds of complements, some clausal, some nominal, and some not at all.

Anonymous

23:17

Notwithstanding is one of those that can take a clausal complement.

Anonymous

This is traditionally analyzed as a compound preposition notwithstanding that, but we can do away with that . . .

Anonymous

Notwithstanding does end up being a rather unusual preposition, though. Most prepositions don't take clausal complements, most prepositions always precede their complements, and most prepositions which contain the suffix -ing are homophonous with verb forms.

Anonymous

But how do we choose to classify exceptional words? Again, we can describe them on their own, or we can choose the most similar lexical class and describe how they differ from the central (prototypical) members of that class.

Anonymous

How do we choose the most similar class? Well, whichever class lets us describe it with the fewest exceptions, probably. That gives us the most parsimonious analysis.

Anonymous

Could it be a verb? It does have -ing. But there's no verb notwithstand, so it would have to be a highly defective verb.

Anonymous

23:21

Not only that, but it would have to be a verb that can't predicate, and exceptionally has a non-predicative adjunct function.

Anonymous

Following its complement is exceptional no matter what class we put it in.

Anonymous

So really, calling it a preposition is the simplest thing we can do.

Anonymous

English has almost no defective verbs in the first place, and none that look like notwithstand. We have the lexical verb beware, the infinitive marker to, and the modal auxiliaries, and that's about it.

Anonymous

(For a robust defense of to as a defective auxiliary, see Auxiliaries: To's company (Levine 2012).)

Transcript for