tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Jan 30 20:30:35 2006
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]
Re: yopwaH
On Mon, 30 Jan 2006 22:21:22 -0500, Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
>I recently heard a great way of thinking about the way Japanese does
>things. In Japanese, all nouns are mass nouns!
You're right, and that's why you see so many shops in Japan with
English signs like "BOOK" or "CD" -- from the English point of view,
that looks illogical -- it's as if the shop sold one book or CD or
whatever, but from the J point of view it's perfectly logical.
Another way to look at it that may help to understand the Japanese
(and Klingon?) point of view better is to consider nouns as neither
singular nor plural, but simply unmarked for number. For a Japanese
speaker, "hon" could mean either "book" or "books," but unless
context makes it clear, it's not automatically assumed to be one or
the other.
>(Quick review:
>count-nouns are nouns you can count: one book, three glasses.
>Mass-nouns don't have numbers: cake, water, food. A lot of mass nouns
>in English also have count-noun meanings, like "cake", but still we
>usually say "three pieces of cake"; "three cakes" has a special
>meaning). In English when we have a mass-noun that we want to count, we
>have to instantiate it over counters: three *slices* of pizza, twelve
>*sheets* of paper, nine *blocks* of iron. So too, in Japanese, wherein
>all nouns are mass nouns, you need counters for everything. So you have
>to say "seven humans of Samurais" (shichi nin no samurai) and so on.
>They have a whole set of counters (which someone else here certainly
>knows better than I do)... long things, bound things, flat things... So
>you say "five bound-things of book(s)." And so forth.
You're absolutely right about the large numbers of counters; Chinese,
I hear, uses even more. Just one small point, though: the word order
for the genitive "no" is "possessor 'no' possessed," so in your
examples the J structure is actually "samurai of seven humans" and
"books of five bound-things" ("gosatsu no hon"). That looks kind of
strange translated literally into English, though we sometimes use a
similar construction for lengths of time: "five years' experience"
(that is, "experience of five years"), "three days' leave," etc.
As an aside, Japanese has a number of other characteristics that are
quite similar to Klingon: aspect instead of tense; a huge set of
adjectives that behave pretty much like verbs (cf. Klingon's stative
verbs), unlike the nounlike adjectives of European and Semitic
languages; spatial relationships expressed with nouns and locative
postpositions instead of prepositions (teeburu no shita ni == {raS
bIngDaq}, "under the table, below the table"); a rich set of verbal
suffixes and postpositions, many of which map one to one to Klingon:
negative (-(a)nai == {-be'}), causative (-(s)aseru == {-moH}),
passive (-(r)areru == {-lu'}), interrogative (ka == {-'a'}), negative
imperative (-na == {-Qo'}), conditional (-(r)eba == {-chugh}),
potential (-(rar)eru == {-laH}), etc., etc.
>On the whole, I suspect Klingons don't sweat the details of these
>edge-cases too much. I would imagine there would be a reasonable amount
>of usage on both sides and such things are debated only by the really
>pedantic and careful.
My experience with Japanese nouns leads me to agree with you.
-- Stephen Carter
[email protected]
Nagoya, Japan
![[KLI Member]](/pics/KLImemberbutton.gif "[KLI Member]"){kind=small}