Talk:Japanese language

I think it would be a good idea to include Japanese phonemes here - although of c. not all scholars agree on whether say /S/ (as in Japanese shakuhachi) is actually a phoneme...but the number of phonemes etc. is controversial in most languages... http://pub3.ezboard.com/fhumanjapanesejapanesegrammar.showMessage?topicID=509.topic Wathiik----

I saw your posting and I tend agree with the other guy, Shibatani. So you see there are problems already. I assume he posited the /Q/ because these "double consonants" are proceeded by a very brief glotal stop. Or, maybe he is stuck to the writing system, where the double consonants are written tsu+C? However, if you want to post your analysis, I would link it to this page, which is really not a linguistic analysis.

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[I thought that some info on the history of the language and writing system would be useful, but didn't know where it fit. Other things I would add - A quick note on 'small tsu' stopping, a intro to counters, and a mention of additional blending options in Katakana (vowels and also the newer 'v blends'). Just some ideas.]

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Japanese is usually classified as an altaic language. I think there is some scholarly debate about classification of languages re Japanese, but it's usually found under "altaic" in most family trees. I'm not sure how to effect a change of this? Will find out

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Japanese has no proven relation to Altaic languages. Some scholars think it might have such relation but general concensus is that nothing has been proven so far. --Taw

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The Japanese language is very different from English and most other European languages. Like Finnish, Turkish, and Korean, Japanese is an agglutinative language, with two (phonologically distinctive) tones like Serbian/Croatian and Swedish. It is a language where sentences need no subject and adjectives can have past tenses. It is of uncertain affiliation, though there are theories that it is related to E. Asian languages such as Korean (but not Chinese), though phonological and lexical similarities to Malayo-Polynesian languages have also been noted.

What a awful English-centrism. Sentences need no subject is majority of Indo-European languages. English is weird because they do need subject. Just look at: Latin, Italian, Polish, Russian, any other Slavic language (and many more). --Taw

Well, there is a bit of difference there. Those languages all inflect verbs according to subject person/number (ex Latin cogito, cogites), which serves much the same purpose as using a subject pronoun in English (I think, you think). Japanese verbs don't inflect by subject, so if there isn't one explicitly included in the sentence, it's just implied by context. (Of course, that can happen even in English: "Gonna rain" instead of "it's gonna rain", "got milk?" instead of "you got milk?", but these are rarer than subjectless sentences in Japanese.) --Brion VIBBER

Only marking first and second person is obligatory (let's leave issue of number and gender marking). If verb is in third person, the subject is not specified and can be guessed only from context (like in Japanese). --Taw

I respectfully disagree; by that logic, sentences using pronouns are sentences without subjects. The use of a third-person form and/or pronoun (which is obligatory in cases where the referred or inferred subject is not first or second person, no?) may require some context to establish the referent, but so do first and second-person: if you don't know who's speaking and who's being spoken to, you don't know who "I" and "you" refer to, do you? A subjectless sentence makes *no* reference, not even a vague one (speaker/addressee/a third party under discussion). --Brion VIBBER, Sunday, July 7, 2002

If we took Japanese, and made a rule that one must use watasi, anata or other apropriate pronoun for 1st and 2nd person, and do as it is now for 3rd person, then we'd end with Polish system. In most situations there is no such thing as third person ending, and you just use base form for that. Even nicer, one can often move 2nd and 3rd person ending to separate word. Example: "widział" (he saw), "widziałem" (I saw), "żem widział" (I saw, colloquial). "gdzie byli" (where have they been), "gdzie byliście" (where have you (plural) been), "gdzieście byli" (where have you (plural) been). As a side note, in some situations you have to use different forms for 1st (kenjougo) and 2nd (sonkeigo) person, but they are also sometimes used with 3rd person. Taw 13:38 Sep 3, 2002 (PDT)

Obviously I'm in no real position to debate with you over Polish. :) But surely you're not going to try to tell me that Latin supports this? "videbam" (I saw), "videbat" (he saw); "ubi erant" (where were they), "ubi eratis" (where were you/pl). --Brion 19:21 Sep 3, 2002 (PDT)

First, "grammatical subject" and "information about subject" are two different things. Most languages don't require first, but usually have some form of second (verb ending, politeness level etc.).

Second, there are sentences which genuinely have no semantical subject, but need grammatical subject in English, like:

• pada ("it's raining", no "it's" in polish)
• na stole sa dwa jablka ("there are two apples on the table", no "there" in polish)
• nie ma cukru ("there isn't any sugar", grammatically it's subjectless possesion sentence)
• nie wolno palic ("smoking is prohibited" , well in English gerund is subject, in Polish it's just normal verb + infinitive, you can't insert any subject here)
• mozna prosic s¨®l ? ("may I ask for salt ?", it is grammatically completely subjectless again, impossible to insert subject)

There are many other such constructs in Polish, in both colloquial and polite language.

Third, Latin also doesn't need subject, only information about subject. --Taw

Apparently, you're trying to say that there is no grammatical subject unless it has its own entire word? --Brion

Grammatical is ambiguous. In Serv-us vid-et there are two markers of subject, -us and -et, but morphologically in entirely different paradigms. One is part of an omissible element, as the sentence Vid-et is also allowed. In the Polish impersonal sentences the verbs are still marked for the non-omissible 'subject' if you want to call it that: sa, = be:3:pl = '(they) are'. In Japanese there is no corresponding non-omissible marker, so it is somewhat different from the common European pro-drop situation. Gritchka

In both Nie ma cukru (there is no sugar - singular) and Nie ma jablek (there are no apples - plural) the same verb type is used and the noun is in accusative. This marker is non-omissible, but it just has to agree with explicit or implied subject or be in right form in subjectless sentence, and no way it is a subject itself. --Taw

Which is completely unlike Japanese, in which there is no non-omissible subject marker. What was your objection again? --Brion 16:43 Sep 12, 2002 (UTC)

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Check http://pl.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?J%EAzyk_japo%F1ski and all related pages on Polish Wikipedia. There is really lot of stuff there. --Taw

Hope you don't mind, Tomasz, but I shrunk your "watashi" writing sample from 800x600 to 200x150. (Also, why is "Watasi" in kunrei-shiki but "Romaji" in Hepburn? ;) --Brion VIBBER

In general it's better to recreate image instead of shrinking to get slightly better font quality.

According to sci.lang.japanese faq, Kunrei standard says that Hepburn-written words in Kunrei text are "only to be used for words with strong international connotations, those that are customarily romanised that way or if it strongly improves the information content". I think that "Romaji" and "Kanji" are such words, but don't have strong feelings about that. I prefer kana anyway. --Taw

Tomasz, I like kana for two reasons:

1) They are cute.

2) When putting up karaoke lyrics for an international group to sing along with, would you not prefer kana? There are so many romaji systems.

I don't think kana for karaoke would be a good idea. International vocal groups are more likely to be familiar with Latin-based systems that bear some semblance to IPA or SAMPA.

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I fixed some formatting in the conversation examples. --Ed Poor

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This needs to be checked for accuracy before posting:

Sometimes, a word in Japanese both looks and sounds like a word in Chinese. Examples:

		Pronunciation (in SAMPA)
Word	Meaning	Japanese	Chinese	Korean
愛	love	/ai/	/ai/	/{/
存在	existence	/sonzai/	/sondzai/Is this right?	/dZondZ{/

This is because of borrowing of words from Chinese into Japanese.

However, not all words which were borrowed in this way are alike in today's speech. There may even be false friends. An interesting case is that of the Japanese numeral for ten (/dZu:/), because it sounds like the Chinese numeral for nine (/dZju/ is this right?). (The Japanese numeral for nine is /kju:/.)

 ten in Korean /Sip/, nine in Korean between /ku:/ and /gu:/. --Kein Linguist

Examples from Korean, etc., would be good as well. I think they exist.

--Juuitchan

I don't speak Chinese (of any variety), but I do have an English-Mandarin dictionary. 存在 is in pinyin cun2zai4, which if the pronunciation guide in the back is to be believed is pronounced something like [ts`u@n/ tsai\]. /sondzai/ might be fitted more easily to the pronunciation in some other Chinese language, of course, which is why you need to specify... Likewise, Mandarin nine is jiu3 [ts`i@u\/]. --Brion

I got it from this: I was listening to a CD with ladies singing in Chinese. I heard a word that sounded nearly identical to Japanese "sonzai". When I looked at the lyrics, I realized that the kanji were the same. --Juuitchan

Japanese language borrowed their syllabries and ideograms from Chinese and developed into a system of its own. A kanji may mean something in Chinese, though each kanji refers to different idea in Chinese. No general rule could be drawn for their relationship in meaning. For instance, 私 (Japanese) = I (English) = private (Chinese) that is often not used individually, like 私人 private, 自私 selfish etc. But 大出血 (kanji) means great discount in English and bears no meaning in Chinese. kt2

Japanese language has been, like many others, changing over time. I've heard that there are many waves of Chinese influences/ adoptations from China. Most chinese characters used in Japan has two different kinds of pronounciation - on-yomi and kun-yomi, correspoinding to pronounciations of chinese and japanese origins, respectively. Now there are often multiple on-yomi (chinese-originated pronounciation) for a single chinese character, and some of them are attributed to the times those pronouciations are adopted.

The letter "明" (brightness) reads "mei" (as in "文明") or "myou" （as in "光明"）depending on other characters combined with it, and both pronounciations are from china, of possibly different era. The similarity of the contemporary Chinese and contemporary Japanese are, not coincidence. But due to the changes over time occurred for both languages, there isn't neat regularities.

I'm aware of at least three kinds of chinese-originated pronounciations: 呉音,漢音,唐音.

Disclaimer: I'm a native speaker of Japanese, but not a linguist. Tomos 05:31 Jan 31, 2003 (UTC)

addendum: 存在 pronounces "sonZai," I guess, at least that sounds closer to my not-so-trained ears.

Also, after reading the article and the talk page again, I now come to think that it might help to clarify some more things. Japanese language includes many words imported from China. These days, there is some reverse flow (Chenese importing terms from Japanese - esp. translation of Western words into chinese characters), as I understand. In other words, at the level of writing, as opposed to pronounciation, there is another reason for the commonalities.

But Japanese has a large amount of its original words. Those are usually related kun-yomi of chinese characters, the japanese-originated way of pronounciation. Sorry for this complexity, but what happened was that Japanese people imported Chenese characters, its pronounciations, and many words, while at the same time inventing the way to write their own words using those imported characters. Before importing the chenese characters, Japanese didn't have writing.

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The article looks like still a language guide for English-speakers. While it is not completely wrong, it might mislead people. I don't think for example, Romaji is such a big topic in Japanese language because the Japanese hardly use it in their everyday life. So I will or did already:

• remove romaji section to romaji article with a pointer.
• delete duplication
• add much more examples beyond language learning guide

Or you can help me out to do this if you happen to know something about Japanese language. Cheers! -- Taku 13:32 May 14, 2003 (UTC)