Japanese Language

Anonymous

12:01 AM

Since it parses as ［森の近くの］家 and 森の［近い家]

Anonymous

Hmm. I really hate leaving comments saying things are grammatical or ungrammatical, since I feel like I'm likely to be wrong.

Flaw

1:15 AM

@snailplane I think Susumu Kuno's book mentioned that somewhere

I'm not sure though, but I have this feeling I've read that somewhere

Maybe a different book, I just flipped through the book and couldn't find it

taylor

1:53 AM

@ssb i gave you downvote because I believe your answer is not useful (the criteria of a downvote). it's too literal, and i think we both know that it is the idiomatic meaning that needs translation. i know downvotes can get personal, but it's judgement on your answer, not a judgement on you.

@ssb it's not that it's too simple, it's that your answer, at least I believe, is answer which misinterprets the question. since I can't tell if it was a deliberate misinterpretation (ie an answer to simply score points and earn rep) all I can do to communicate to you that it is not an accurate interpretation of the question is to downvote.

ssb

2:18 AM

@taylor It is a literal translation but only because the idiom literally exists in Japanese

you can use it in the same way and people will understand. I assumed that based on his question he was looking for an equivalently idiomatic way of saying something. My error might have been assuming that he had the level of Japanese necessary to express this in other ways and that he was looking for a more advanced interpretation. If he was just looking for a way to express that via idiom or not then yeah my answer would have been less helpful, so I added a little.

Flaw

2:37 AM

Is パンドラの箱 widely recognised?

I guess it's the easiest way to import directly from Greek mythology

Anonymous

@Flaw I've run into it in Japanese stuff.

djahandarie

Haha. I truly wonder how I misspelled etymology in the title of that question.

Also, what happened to the bolding there? It looked fine in the preview. Weird.

Flaw

2:52 AM

The ** method doesn't work for kana

djahandarie

Ah. Shucks.

Flaw

But if it can look fine in the preview, then it should also be able to appear afterwards

I don't know why it doesn't though

djahandarie

Well, the preview is probably done using a different parser than the generation, since one is probably implemented in Javascript and the other in some server-side language.

(Just a guess.) They should be consistent though.

Flaw

The で question is really hard to answer

I don't know how to deal with "5. そうではない"

djahandarie

Yeah, I imagine. But I've been told "they're all the same thing" in the past, and that has been making me wonder for ages.

Flaw

2:58 AM

I think 5. is で+ある then で＋は＋ない for negated

The problem after breaking up the copula である is that I don't know what to make of the individual parts

I thought that である is already a smallest unit of meaning, but I guess we can go further.

djahandarie

@Flaw I analyze that as 用言の連用形＋係助詞＋形容詞

すごくはいい

すごくはない

好きではいい

Etc.

Flaw

"awesomely good"
"is not awesome(ly)" ?

djahandarie

The latter is just "is not awesome", but yes.

Flaw

Then what is 好きではいい ?

"It's alright to like ~" ?

Anonymous

I think you might need context to figure out what that は is doing there...?

djahandarie

3:03 AM

Well, 好きではいい is a weird one, but it's grammatical (to my knowledge). That's how I'd translate it I think.

Flaw

I'd have done 好きでもいい

djahandarie

Yes, that's definitely a better choice.

Anonymous

@Flaw In English, you can say "another" or "a whole nother", even though it doesn't consist of "a" and "nother", and the tmesis doesn't cause you to reanalyze "another" as two words when you see it on its own

Anonymous

Even though etymologically it is two words, "an" and "other"

Anonymous

So just because something has become one word doesn't mean it can't be split, and just because it can be split doesn't mean it isn't one word :-)

Flaw

3:07 AM

I'm now thinking of taking である as a sentence itself

But I need to bring in に so that ある ties in

It's a bit of a circular reasoning to say that で derives from a copula, and then think about で+ある

There's something more fundamental I'm missing.

djahandarie

I don't think it'll be possible to answer my question with a modern analysis only, either way.

It'll probably require knowledge of old and classical Japanese.

Flaw

The study of Quantum Japanese

djahandarie

(I hope all my questions about random historical useless stuff are on-topic here, that tends to be what I post about.)

Anonymous

They are on-topic

Flaw

It is on topic

Anonymous

3:15 AM

I might ask that question about どんな　←　どのような

Anonymous

I like Japanese etymology. A lot of the time, I feel like stuff makes more sense when I understand where it comes from

Anonymous

It might not actually make more sense, but it ends up fitting into neat categories in my head

Anonymous

For example, I like the idea that 新た・新しい・改める all come from アラタ

Anonymous

And that the た and ら got mixed up in あたらしい

Anonymous

It means those words can all occupy one category together in my mind.

Anonymous

3:24 AM

Also, metathesis is a neat word.

Flaw

@snailplane Hooray for neat categories in our heads!

Flaw

3:39 AM

I dropped my pen on its tip. I feel like I'm writing with a marker now.

Anonymous

4:10 AM

@Flaw A fell-tip marker?

Flaw

Was a ballpoint pen.

Now it lets out too much ink.

Anonymous

Sorry, I just wanted to make a pun on felt-tip. It may have failed :-)

Flaw

Ah, sorry. Was preoccupied with my lab report

Anonymous

I want to point out that when people refer to meta questions tagged "FAQ" as though it's the site FAQ, it's confusing.

Anonymous

It may be the site FAQ, but there's another page which is actually linked everywhere that calls itself the FAQ.

Anonymous

4:14 AM

So, when I signed up, I had no idea the real FAQ was secretly hidden among various questions on a sub-site whose existence was only briefly mentioned

Anonymous

Oh, hey

Anonymous

The FAQ has been updated since I signed up.

Anonymous

Maybe I don't need to point this out after all!

Flaw

You mean this page? japanese.stackexchange.com/faq

Anonymous

I sure do.

Anonymous

4:16 AM

Did it really have all those links to meta questions when I signed up?

Anonymous

Because I totally don't remember that.

Flaw

I think jkerian edited it

Anonymous

I remember it looking like boilerplate.

Anonymous

Well, hooray for that!

Anonymous

Although...

Anonymous

4:18 AM

It's much better than how I remember it, but I think a question or two could be added, still.

Anonymous

@jkerian linked recently to meta.japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/806/… on a question where bold went wrong

Anonymous

I don't see that question linked from the FAQ. Is it appropriate to add a link?

Anonymous

I ask because I managed to miss this question's existence until his comment.

Anonymous

Yeah, I think it could go under "How do I ask?"

jkerian

@snailplane Unfortunately I can only edit the very top of the official FAQ

(I only edited the site-faq a few days ago)

Anonymous

4:27 AM

A-ha! So the old linkless FAQ wasn't a figment of my imagination.

jkerian

At one point, I asked the other mods to make the top of the site-FAQ look like this: meta.japanese.stackexchange.com/a/814/29

Now that I have the power to do it, I'm not so sure it's a good idea.

Anonymous

Well, thanks for editing the top part! I think it's a lot less confusing now.

Anonymous

I was mostly recounting my experience as a new user N months ago--I didn't have a clue about meta.

jkerian

yeah, and considering that the off-topic message even links you to the FAQ...

Anonymous

I kind of want to ask a question about 「色をしている」・・・

jkerian

4:37 AM

seems reasonable

Anonymous

青い and 青色をしている

Flaw

～をしている for describing intrinsic quality?

Anonymous

I don't know. Do you think those are strict synonyms? 青い and 青色をしている

Anonymous

Or do you think there's some distinction?

Flaw

I would interpret 青い as a incidental quality

That is to say that it could have come in other colours

Anonymous

4:41 AM

青いりんご・赤いりんご

Flaw

Or it is first ~, then 青い is a descriptor

jkerian

japanese.stackexchange.com/faq

Hmm... no expansion... anyways... criticism is welcome

BTW... it's HIGHLY annoying that the edit box for that FAQ entry is a regular markdown box. It makes you think you can do things like normal markdown-style links. You can't... the box is raw HTML only.

Anonymous

Yikes, that does sound irritating.

jkerian

Yeah... clicking any of the buttons generates only a somewhat confused preview-pane... and a more confused moderator

Anonymous

I can't think of a good way to stick in question 806 (formatting), but I think you probably could stick it in the top part

Anonymous

4:51 AM

It'd just be slightly incongruous

Anonymous

Like as an aside

jkerian

It's in there right now as the second paragraph

Anonymous

Ooh, is it?

jkerian

refresh :)

Anonymous

I have! I think perhaps I'm getting a cached version.

jkerian

4:52 AM

huh

We have a few tricks and tools available on the site to help write questions, including furigana, markdown bug workarounds, and a few standard notations.

^ What I added

Anonymous

Ahh, neat

Anonymous

I wonder if anyone's really asked themselves "Why does this site look so neutral?" before reading the FAQ.

jkerian

I tend to doubt it... but I'm hardly the artsy type

Anonymous

Me either. I love to draw, but it comes out as scribbles.

jkerian

heh... lovely control knob I've got here "RW_ENABLE_DISABLE"

Anonymous

5:12 AM

@Pacerier Ping! Have you been in chat before?

Anonymous

I'm responding to your comment here, which you say is off-topic, so I thought chat might be a better place to follow up

Anonymous

What morphemes are 宮（きゅう） and 路（ろ） made of, would you say?

Anonymous

I think they are both monomorphemic, imported from Chinese

Flaw

Maybe he means the components of the kanji

Anonymous

But generally kanji only have one or zero components representing a morpheme

Anonymous

5:21 AM

I bet he thought I was referring to the kanji rather than to a particular morpheme represented by those kanji

Anonymous

since I didn't use furigana.

Anonymous

I didn't add readings because I thought it was obvious from context

Anonymous

I have one more confession to make

Anonymous

I hate adding furigana to anything besides the top of a paragraph in an answer.

Anonymous

If furigana goes on the second line or later, it makes the whole paragraph look funny.

Flaw

5:27 AM

my modem died

Anonymous

Welcome back!

Flaw

I think that if you approach the concept of morphemes from "sound"

then we should look at the phonetic components that make up a kanji

Anonymous

Those are just lossy transcriptions of the morphemes themselves, which are independent of the writing system

Flaw

きゅう and ろ would be morphemes because you can't break the sound down further

Anonymous

In 路 for example, we have 各, which represents a number of different sounds in modern Japanese

Anonymous

5:30 AM

including mainly カク and キャク, and also リャク and ガク

Flaw

but you don't get 路 by pronunciating 足+各

Anonymous

But that doesn't mean those are all related morphemes, just that they sounded similar or the same at some point in the past, probably

Anonymous

No, but you do get it by writing 足 and 各, and 各 is the phonetic component in that kanji

Anonymous

Do you mean something else by phonetic component?

Anonymous

Or wait, is 路 semasio-phonetic at all?

Flaw

5:33 AM

I was thinking without the writing system

Anonymous

Oh, I got confused because "phonetic component" usually refers to the part of a character used to transcribe the sound in a 形声文字

Anonymous

When I said morpheme in the first place I hoped it was obvious I meant sound, not writing :-)

Anonymous

I think my attempt to pull Pacerier into chat has failed.

jkerian

I can do it... but I doubt I wonder if that's an abuse of the super-ping

Anonymous

Well, I left a comment when Pacerier didn't respond to the ping.

Flaw

5:37 AM

Is a super ping any different from a regular ping?

Brightly coloured maybe?

jkerian

@Flaw No range-limit, basically

I can summon anyone on the site into any chatroom

Anonymous

Plus, doesn't it have two at-signs?

Anonymous

That's a lot of punctuation for one person.

jkerian

usually it's used to haul people into private/locked chatrooms to ask them to stop doing something

Anonymous

"Stop asking good questions!"

Anonymous

5:39 AM

"Let that be a lesson to you."

Anonymous

I have yet another confession to make.

Anonymous

I delete comments and re-comment when I want to edit them.

Anonymous

Hopefully that's not too irritating. (I read somewhere that deleted comments are invisible to everyone, even moderators, but that moderators can ask to be able to see them.)

jkerian

Hmm... I can see them if I go to the post-history. But I'm not actually sure where the button to get to that is.

(if there are flags on a question or answer, a button shows up to go to that history)

Pacerier

6:23 AM

hmm lol, the problem with chat (at least for me) is that there's too many messages flying arnd too quickly, it gets messy and it's hard to have any real discussion (because by the time i can reply, there's another 3 or 4 messages to reply lols)

hmm ok, anyway what i wanted to say is that the kanji 路 is not a morpheme because it can be furthur subdivided into smaller semantic units in the japanese written language (as demonstrated at http://goo.gl/0MwXl). This is the same for the kanji 宮. Also, "きゅう" is made up of 3 morphemes "き", "ゅ", and "う". And "ろ" itself is a morpheme in the Japanese w…

Anonymous

Ah, I see. I disagree with that definition of morpheme, because I don't believe /r/ and /o/ individually lend any meaning to ろ

Anonymous

And likewise for dividing up きゅう

Anonymous

So I guess I should say I agree with the definition, but I disagree with how you're applying the definition

Anonymous

@Flaw I asked the color question japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/11360/…

Anonymous

@Pacerier I apologize for all the messages flying around! :-)

Anonymous

6:31 AM

Morphemes are not synonymous with graphemes in written language nor with phonemes in spoken language, because individual phonemes do not necessarily contribute meaning on their own (meaning = semantics) and therefore the smallest semantic unit is often larger than a phoneme; and because individual graphemes can correspond to a different level of organization either larger or smaller than a morpheme (particularly in Japanese, where you can write something more than one way)

Anonymous

That is, /r/ can combine with other sounds including /o/, but they won't have any shared meaning carried by /r/. /r/ by itself is meaningless, so it must be smaller than the smallest semantic unit.

Flaw

7:49 AM

@Pacerier That's how chat is I guess, but usually there aren't too many overlapping conversations

I disagree with "Also, "きゅう" is made up of 3 morphemes".

When you cut it up there isn't any smaller semantic unit

I think you might have phoneme and morpheme confused.

Pacerier

8:09 AM

sry for the delay, anyway just in case we start discussing about different things I'd like to say that when I say "meaning" I mean the "semantic meaning" and thus leaving pragmatics out of the window.

anyway, in japanese spoken language, the sound /r/ does not carry meaning *by itself*, but it definitely **contributes** to meaning and hence is a semantic unit. The native speaker will perceive different meanings depending on its presence. The sound /ro/ is made up of the consonant /r/ and the vowel /o/. The consonant contributes to meaning, because /ro/ is perceived to have a different mean…

@Flaw, the sound "きゅう" is made up of /k/ + /y/ + /u/ + /u/. We can prove that all four of these has meaning in the japanese spoken language by removing any one of them. If the semantic meaning doesn't change, it does not contribute to the semantic meaning and thus is not a semantic unit.
However, removing any one of them would change the semantic meaning, and hence the units /k/ + /y/ + /u/ + /u/ are semantic.

A morpheme is the smallest semantic unit in a language, a grapheme is the smallest semantic unit in a written language, a phoneme is the smallest semantic unit in a spoken language, …

Flaw

Still disagree

You cannot form a meaning with きゅう by summing up the "meanings" of any smaller parts

きゅう stands as it is

Unlike 食べたい; you can break this up into root たべ and desiderative たい

きゅう does not decompose into smaller units of meaning

Removing any thing from きゅう would obviously change its meaning, but not because the individual parts are semantically loaded but because it falls apart entirely.

Take the number "ni". It means two. You cannot assign a meaning to /n/ and another to /i/ and say that the combination systematically forms the meaning "two".

This is unlike たべたい. We can assign "eat" to たべ and "desire" to たい, and we can systematically form たべたい, ~たい.

The same thing happens when you analyse in terms of graphemes.

a horizontal stroke can be a grapheme for "one".

Therefore 二 can be built from the grapheme 一

But there are many other kanji with horizontal strokes

Not all the horizontal strokes carry the meaning "one"

If you take out the final stroke from 口, you will have a horizontal stroke, and an open-bottom box. It falls apart entirely because neither of them are semantically loaded.

(For the previous 6 lines, replace grapheme with morpheme)

Pacerier

9:56 AM

@Flaw, I know where you are coming from. We agree on the orthodox definition of a morpheme as *"the smallest semantic unit in a language"* but we disagree on the definition of a *"semantic unit"*. Your definition (orthodox) of a *"semantic unit"* is "a unit that has stand-alone semantic meaning", while my definition (unorthodox) is "a unit that *contributes* to semantic meaning".

I have provided points backing up that argument (simply, as opposed to the orthodox definition of "semantic meaning", I regard it more rational to consider a unit semantic if the native speaker will perceive diffe…

Flaw

But if one cannot perceive a different meaning systematically upon addition of a unit, then it is not a morpheme.

if "ni" is made of n+i such that n+i=2, then "nana" is made of n+a+n+a=7 ?
Then a=3.5-n, and "san" is made of s+3.5=3, s=-0.5 ?

Pacerier

11:41 AM

Whenever we add a unit, the meaning changes. Whenever we subtract a unit, the meaning changes. I consider this *systematic* and thus one can perceive a different meaning *systematically* (addition / subtraction).

Also, /n/ + /a/ + /n/ + /a/ is 4 units and /s/ + /a/ + /n/ is 3 units. The "semantic unit" is a language-independent device that has nothing to do with *mora*.

Anonymous

1:01 PM

Ah, carry on, then. I thought you simply didn't know what a morpheme was. I didn't realize you rejected the usual definition and decided to make an argument for your own, knowing that it was something different than what people usually meant by the term.

Anonymous

I still don't agree with your argument, but I've already explained why, so repeating myself won't help anything, and I'll just leave it at that.

Flaw

@Pacerier I do not agree with your argument, so I guess we'll leave it at that.

Anonymous

1:21 PM

@Flaw Ripley's kittens are adopted... so here is a cat in a glass: youtube.com/watch?v=OFDnPIuLMFY

Flaw

O_O

That's too cute

Anonymous

2:06 PM

The 青い question got a downvote. I think I should just accept that I'm not going to be able to ask any questions without getting at least one downvote or close vote

Flaw

Don't let it bother you

Anonymous

Yeah, I just kept taking it as feedback, like "you need to make better questions"

Flaw

But your question was fine anyway

Anonymous

3:02 PM

I wonder how often people say パンドラの壺

Anonymous

I've only seen パンドラの箱

Anonymous

I wonder if パンドラの壺 sounds as pedantic as "Pandora's jar" does in English...

Flaw

5:18 PM

how would 壺 be read?

Anonymous

I meant ツボ

jkerian

5:40 PM

I haven't forced this closed since I don't want to be the first and only vote on it... but it's the most straightforward "please translate this for me" that we've seen here in awhile.

It's a bit silly how easy this is... just put a translation of the rest of the sentence in place and then say "I don't understand how the phrase 人の身で灯りも無く fits into this" would probably be sufficient.

Anonymous

Can you see their deleted questions?

Anonymous

I think they might have contained comments to that effect, but I'm not sure anymore

jkerian

6:12 PM

Yeah, a few other "please translate"-type questions. Self-deleted, just as someone mentioned in that question.

Anonymous

6:23 PM

I am finding it helpful to sit down and read through A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar, by the way

Anonymous

Though I think it works best in small doses, spread out

jkerian

9:04 PM

I'm always surprised at people who think they can ignore formal conjugations and understand Japanese "just fine". If you're included on any cross-company emails, they're incredibly thick with the stuff.

(particularly when we're the customer for a multi-billion dollar contract... holy crap is this stuff hard to read)

@snailplane How informative are you finding it? as opposed to just 'formalizing' your knowledge a bit?

Anonymous

@jkerian Well, I keep mentioning the "filling in holes in the basics" idea, which is what I continue to think is most important for me personally. Today I learned about までに

Anonymous

My method right now is "go through every example, then see if my understanding for the example is right"

Anonymous

So if I'm wrong, I go through the rest of that particular entry.

jkerian

までに communicates something of a "deadline" meaning... IIRC

(there's probably much more to it than that... that I'm forgetting atm)

Anonymous

Yep! The book uses the term "time limit", which is more or less the same thing

jkerian

9:15 PM

The one I always have a hard time is telling when あとで and あとに are inappropriate, and need to be simplified to just plain あと

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