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Japanese Grammar
Japanese is an agglutinative, synthetic, mora-timed language with simple phonotactics, a pure vowel system, phonemic vowel and consonant length, and a lexically significant pitch-accent. Word order is normally subject–object–verb with particles marking the grammatical function of words, and sentence structure is topic–comment. Its phrases are exclusively head-final and compound sentences are exclusively left-branching. Sentence-final particles are used to add emotional or emphatic impact, or make questions. Nouns have no grammatical number or gender, and there are no articles. Verbs are conjugated, primarily for tense and voice, but not person. Japanese adjectives are also conjugated. Japanese has a complex system of honorifics with verb forms and vocabulary to indicate the relative status of the speaker, the listener, and persons mentioned. In language typology, it has many features different from most European languages. Distinctive aspects of modern Japanese senten ... [...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] |
English Language
English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the island of Great Britain. Existing on a dialect continuum with Scots, and then closest related to the Low Saxon and Frisian languages, English is genealogically West Germanic. However, its vocabulary is also distinctively influenced by dialects of France (about 29% of Modern English words) and Latin (also about 29%), plus some grammar and a small amount of core vocabulary influenced by Old Norse (a North Germanic language). Speakers of English are called Anglophones. The earliest forms of English, collectively known as Old English, evolved from a group of West Germanic (Ingvaeonic) dialects brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the 5th century and further mutated by Norse-speaking Viking settlers starting in the 8th and 9th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eleanor Harz Jorden
Eleanor Harz Jorden (1920 – February 18, 2009) was an American linguistics scholar and an influential Japanese language educator and expert. Born Eleanor Harz, she married William Jorden, reporter and diplomat; the marriage ended in divorce. Jorden earned her Ph.D. at Yale University under the direction of Bernard Bloch in 1950.J. Marshall Unger, ''Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan'' (Oxford University Press US, 1996: ), p. 100. She was best known for her seminal textbooks on the Japanese language, including ''Beginning Japanese'' and '' Japanese: The Spoken Language''. The latter text included Jorden's JSL system of rōmaji for transcribing Japanese into Roman script. Her explanations of the subtleties of Japanese grammar and usage are still widely referenced today. Jorden taught Japanese at many educational institutions, including Cornell University, Bryn Mawr College, Johns Hopkins University, Williams College, the University of Hawaii, Internationa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Defective Verb
In linguistics, a defective verb is a verb that either lacks a conjugated form or entails incomplete conjugation, and thus cannot be conjugated for certain grammatical tenses, aspects, persons, genders, or moods that the majority of verbs or a "normal" or regular verb in a particular language can be conjugated for. That is to say, a defective verb lacks forms that most verbs in a particular language have. English Common defectives The most commonly recognized defective verbs in English are auxiliary verbs—the class of preterite-present verbs—''can/could'', ''may/might'', ''shall/should'', ''must'', ''ought'', and ''will/would'' (''would'' being a later historical development). Though these verbs were not originally defective, in most varieties of English today, they occur only in a modal auxiliary sense. However, unlike normal auxiliary verbs, they are not regularly conjugated in the infinitive mood. Therefore, these defective auxiliaries do not accept each other as ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Word Class
In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech (abbreviated as POS or PoS, also known as word class or grammatical category) is a category of words (or, more generally, of lexical items) that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are assigned to the same part of speech generally display similar syntactic behavior (they play similar roles within the grammatical structure of sentences), sometimes similar morphological behavior in that they undergo inflection for similar properties and even similar semantic behavior. Commonly listed English parts of speech are noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, interjection, numeral, article, and determiner. Other terms than ''part of speech''—particularly in modern linguistic classifications, which often make more precise distinctions than the traditional scheme does—include word class, lexical class, and lexical category. Some authors restrict the term ''lexical category'' to refer only to a particular ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Preposition And Postposition
Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in'', ''under'', ''towards'', ''before'') or mark various semantic roles (''of'', ''for''). A preposition or postposition typically combines with a noun phrase, this being called its complement, or sometimes object. A preposition comes before its complement; a postposition comes after its complement. English generally has prepositions rather than postpositions – words such as ''in'', ''under'' and ''of'' precede their objects, such as ''in England'', ''under the table'', ''of Jane'' – although there are a few exceptions including "ago" and "notwithstanding", as in "three days ago" and "financial limitations notwithstanding". Some languages that use a different word order have postpositions instead, or have both types. The phrase formed by a preposition or postposition together with its comp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Joseph Harold Greenberg
Joseph Harold Greenberg (May 28, 1915 – May 7, 2001) was an American linguist, known mainly for his work concerning linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages. Life Early life and education Joseph Greenberg was born on May 28, 1915, to Jewish parents in Brooklyn, New York. His first great interest was music. At the age of 14, he gave a piano concert in Steinway Hall. He continued to play the piano frequently throughout his life. After graduating from James Madison High School, he decided to pursue a scholarly career rather than a musical one. He enrolled at Columbia College in New York in 1932. During his senior year, he attended a class taught by Franz Boas concerning American Indian languages. He graduated in 1936 with a bachelor degree. With references from Boas and Ruth Benedict, he was accepted as a graduate student by Melville J. Herskovits at Northwestern University in Chicago and graduated in 1940 with a doctorate degree. During the course ... [...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 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] |
Grammatical Person
In linguistics, grammatical person is the grammatical distinction between deictic references to participant(s) in an event; typically the distinction is between the speaker ( first person), the addressee ( second person), and others (third person). A language's set of ''personal'' pronouns are defined by grammatical person, but other pronouns would not. ''First person'' includes the speaker (English: ''I'', ''we'', ''me'', and ''us''), ''second person'' is the person or people spoken to (English: ''you''), and ''third person'' includes all that are not listed above (English: ''he'', ''she'', ''it'', ''they'', ''him'', ''her'', ''them''). It also frequently affects verbs, and sometimes nouns or possessive relationships. Related classifications Number In Indo-European languages, first-, second-, and third-person pronouns are typically also marked for singular and plural forms, and sometimes dual form as well (grammatical number). Inclusive/exclusive distinction Some other ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Voice (grammar)
In grammar, the voice of a verb describes the relationship between the action (or state) that the verb expresses and the participants identified by its arguments (subject, object, etc.). When the subject is the agent or doer of the action, the verb is in the active voice. When the subject is the patient, target or undergoer of the action, the verb is said to be in the passive voice. When the subject both performs and receives the action expressed by the verb, the verb is in the middle voice. Voice is sometimes called diathesis. The following pair of examples illustrates the contrast between active and passive voice in English. In sentence (1), the verb form ''ate'' is in the active voice, but in sentence (2), the verb form ''was eaten'' is in the passive voice. Independent of voice, ''the cat'' is the Agent (the doer) of the action of eating in both sentences. # ''The cat ate the mouse.'' # ''The mouse was eaten by the cat.'' In a transformation from an active-voice clause to a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Grammatical Tense
In grammar, tense is a grammatical category, category that expresses time reference. Tenses are usually manifested by the use of specific forms of verbs, particularly in their grammatical conjugation, conjugation patterns. The main tenses found in many languages include the past tense, past, present tense, present, and future tense, future. Some languages have only two distinct tenses, such as past and nonpast, or future and Nonfuture tense, nonfuture. There are also tenseless languages, like most of the Varieties of Chinese, Chinese languages, though they can possess a future and Nonfuture tense, nonfuture system typical of Sino-Tibetan languages. In recent work Maria Bittner and Judith Tonhauser have described the different ways in which tenseless languages nonetheless mark time. On the other hand, some languages make finer tense distinctions, such as remote vs recent past, or near vs remote future. Tenses generally express time relative to the TUTT (linguistics), moment of s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
