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Ichidan
The Japanese language has two main types of verbs which are referred to as and . Verb groups Categories are important when conjugating Japanese verbs, since conjugation patterns vary according to the verb's category. For example, and belong to different verb categories (godan and ichidan, respectively) and therefore follow different conjugation patterns. Most Japanese verbs are allocated into two categories: # # Statistically, there are far more godan verbs than ichidan verbs. Sometimes categorization is expanded to include a third category of irregular verbs—which most notably include the verbs and . Classical Japanese had more verb groups, such as and , which are archaic in Modern Japanese. Terminology Within the terms and , the numbers and correspond with the number of rows that a verb stem (or inflectional suffix) can span in the gojūon kana table. This is best visualized by comparing various verb conjugations to an extracted column of the gojūon table: In ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Japanese Verb Conjugations
Japanese verbs, like the verbs of many other languages, can be phonetically modified to change their purpose, nuance or meaning – a process known as conjugation. In Japanese, the beginning of a word (the ''stem'') is preserved during conjugation, whilst the ending of the word is altered in some way to change the meaning (this is the ''inflectional suffix''). Japanese verb conjugations are independent of person, number and gender (they do not depend on whether the subject is ''I'', ''you'', ''he'', ''she'', ''we'', etc.); the conjugated forms can express meanings such as negation, present and past tense, volition, passive voice, causation, imperative and conditional mood, and ability. There are also special forms for conjunction with other verbs, and for combination with particles for additional meanings. Japanese verbs have agglutinating properties: some of the conjugated forms are themselves conjugable verbs (or ''i''-adjectives), which can result in several suffixes ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Japanese Verb Conjugation
Japanese verbs, like the verbs of many other languages, can be phonetically modified to change their purpose, nuance or meaning – a process known as conjugation. In Japanese, the beginning of a word (the ''stem'') is preserved during conjugation, whilst the ending of the word is altered in some way to change the meaning (this is the ''inflectional suffix''). Japanese verb conjugations are independent of person, number and gender (they do not depend on whether the subject is ''I'', ''you'', ''he'', ''she'', ''we'', etc.); the conjugated forms can express meanings such as negation, present and past tense, volition, passive voice, causation, imperative and conditional mood, and ability. There are also special forms for conjunction with other verbs, and for combination with particles for additional meanings. Japanese verbs have agglutinating properties: some of the conjugated forms are themselves conjugable verbs (or ''i''-adjectives), which can result in several suffixes being ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Japanese Language
is spoken natively by about 128 million people, primarily by Japanese people and primarily in Japan, the only country where it is the national language. Japanese belongs to the Japonic or Japanese- Ryukyuan language family. There have been many attempts to group the Japonic languages with other families such as the Ainu, Austroasiatic, Koreanic, and the now-discredited Altaic, but none of these proposals has gained widespread acceptance. Little is known of the language's prehistory, or when it first appeared in Japan. Chinese documents from the 3rd century AD recorded a few Japanese words, but substantial Old Japanese texts did not appear until the 8th century. From the Heian period (794–1185), there was a massive influx of Sino-Japanese vocabulary into the language, affecting the phonology of Early Middle Japanese. Late Middle Japanese (1185–1600) saw extensive grammatical changes and the first appearance of European loanwords. The basis of the standard dialect moved f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Japanese Particles
Japanese particles, or , are suffixes or short words in Japanese grammar that immediately follow the modified noun, verb, adjective, or sentence. Their grammatical range can indicate various meanings and functions, such as speaker affect and assertiveness. Orthography and diction Japanese particles are written in hiragana in modern Japanese, though some of them also have kanji forms ( or for ''te'' ; for ''ni'' ; or for ''o'' ; and for ''wa'' ). Particles follow the same rules of phonetic transcription as all Japanese words, with the exception of (written ''ha'', pronounced ''wa'' as a particle), (written ''he'', pronounced ''e'') and (written using a hiragana character with no other use in modern Japanese, originally assigned as ''wo'', now usually pronounced ''o'', though some speakers render it as ''wo''). These exceptions are a relic of historical kana usage. Types of particles There are eight types of particles, depending on what function they serve. : : ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Japanese Adjectives
This article deals with Japanese equivalents of English adjectives. Types of adjective In Japanese, nouns and verbs can modify nouns, with nouns taking the 〜の particles when functioning attributively (in the genitive case), and verbs in the attributive form ( 連体形 ). These are considered separate classes of words, however. Most of the words that can be considered to be adjectives in Japanese fall into one of two categories – variants of verbs, and nouns: *adjectival verb (Japanese: 形容詞, ', literally 形容 "description" or "appearance" + 詞 "word"), or ''i''-adjectives :These can be considered specialized verbs, in that they inflect for various aspects such as past tense or negation, and they can be used predicatively to end a sentence, without the need for any other "to be" verb. For example, ' (暑い) "hot": ::暑い日 () ("a hot day") ::今日は暑い。(.) ("Today is hot.") * adjectival noun ( 形容動詞, ', literally 形容 "description" or "app ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Honorific Speech In Japanese
The Japanese language has a system of honorific speech, referred to as , parts of speech that show respect. Their use is mandatory in many social situations. Honorifics in Japanese may be used to emphasize social distance or disparity in rank, or to emphasize social intimacy or similarity in rank. Japanese honorific titles, often simply called honorifics, consist of suffixes and prefixes when referring to others in a conversation. The system is very extensive, having its own special vocabulary and grammatical forms to express various levels of respectful, humble, and polite speech. It closely resembles other honorifics systems found in the East Asian cultural sphere, such as honorifics in Korean. Introduction Japanese uses honorific constructions to show or emphasize social rank, social intimacy or similarity in rank. The choice of pronoun used, for example, will express the social relationship between the person speaking and the person being referred to, and Japanese often ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Japanese Pitch Accent
is a feature of the Japanese language that distinguishes words by accenting particular morae in most Japanese dialects. The nature and location of the accent for a given word may vary between dialects. For instance, the word for "now" is in the Tokyo dialect, with the accent on the first mora (or equivalently, with a downstep in pitch between the first and second morae), but in the Kansai dialect it is . A final or is often devoiced to or after a downstep and an unvoiced consonant. Standard Japanese Normative pitch accent, essentially the pitch accent of the Tokyo Yamanote dialect, is considered essential in jobs such as broadcasting. The current standards for pitch accent are presented in special accent dictionaries for native speakers such as the ''Shin Meikai Nihongo Akusento Jiten'' () and the ''NHK Nihongo Hatsuon Akusento Jiten'' (). Newsreaders and other speech professionals are required to follow these standards. Foreign learners of Japanese are often not taugh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kana
The term may refer to a number of syllabaries used to write Japanese phonological units, morae. Such syllabaries include (1) the original kana, or , which were Chinese characters (kanji) used phonetically to transcribe Japanese, the most prominent magana system being ; the two descendants of man'yōgana, (2) , and (3) . There are also , which are historical variants of the now-standard hiragana. In current usage, 'kana' can simply mean ''hiragana'' and ''katakana''. Katakana, with a few additions, are also used to write Ainu. A number of systems exist to write the Ryūkyūan languages, in particular Okinawan, in hiragana. Taiwanese kana were used in Taiwanese Hokkien as glosses (ruby text or ''furigana'') for Chinese characters in Taiwan when it was under Japanese rule. Each kana character (syllabogram) corresponds to one sound or whole syllable in the Japanese language, unlike kanji regular script, which corresponds to a meaning (logogram). Apart from the five vowels, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Phoneme
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west of England, the sound patterns (''sin'') and (''sing'') are two separate words that are distinguished by the substitution of one phoneme, , for another phoneme, . Two words like this that differ in meaning through the contrast of a single phoneme form a ''minimal pair''. If, in another language, any two sequences differing only by pronunciation of the final sounds or are perceived as being the same in meaning, then these two sounds are interpreted as phonetic variants of a single phoneme in that language. Phonemes that are established by the use of minimal pairs, such as ''tap'' vs ''tab'' or ''pat'' vs ''bat'', are written between slashes: , . To show pronunciation, linguists use square brackets: (indicating an aspirated ''p'' in ''p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mora (linguistics)
A mora (plural ''morae'' or ''moras''; often symbolized μ) is a basic timing unit in the phonology of some spoken languages, equal to or shorter than a syllable. For example, a short syllable such as ''ba'' consists of one mora (''monomoraic''), while a long syllable such as ''baa'' consists of two (''bimoraic''); extra-long syllables with three moras (''trimoraic'') are relatively rare. Such metrics are also referred to as syllable weight. The term comes from the Latin word for "linger, delay", which was also used to translate the Greek word χρόνος : ''chrónos'' (time) in its metrical sense. Formation The general principles for assigning moras to segments are as follows (see Hayes 1989 and Hyman 1985 for detailed discussion): # A syllable onset (the first consonant or consonants of the syllable) does not represent any mora. # The syllable nucleus represents one mora in the case of a short vowel, and two morae in the case of a long vowel or diphthong. Consonants se ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Verb Stem
In linguistics, a word stem is a part of a word responsible for its lexical meaning. The term is used with slightly different meanings depending on the morphology of the language in question. In Athabaskan linguistics, for example, a verb stem is a root that cannot appear on its own and that carries the tone of the word. Athabaskan verbs typically have two stems in this analysis, each preceded by prefixes. In most cases, a word stem is not modified during its declension, while in some languages it can be modified (apophony) according to certain morphological rules or peculiarities, such as sandhi. For example in Polish: ("city"), but ("in the city"). In English: "sing", "sang", "sung". Uncovering and analyzing cognation between word stems and roots within and across languages has allowed comparative philology and comparative linguistics to determine the history of languages and language families. Usage In one usage, a word stem is a form to which affixes can be attached. T ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Historical Kana Usage
The , or , refers to the in general use until orthographic reforms after World War II; the current orthography was adopted by Cabinet order in 1946. By that point the historical orthography was no longer in accord with Japanese pronunciation. It differs from modern usage ('' Gendai kana-zukai'') in the number of characters and the way those characters are used. There was considerable opposition to the official adoption of the current orthography, on the grounds that the historical orthography conveys meanings better, and some writers continued to use it for many years after. The historical orthography is found in almost all Japanese dictionaries, such as ''Kōjien.'' In the current edition of the ''Kōjien,'' if the historical orthography is different from the modern spelling, the old spelling is printed in tiny ''katakana'' between the modern ''kana'' and ''kanji'' transcriptions of the word. Ellipses are used to save space when the historical and modern spellings are ident ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
