Tag: Japanese

Days of the week in East Asia

Japanese and Korean name 5 days of the week using words for traditional elements (fire, water, wood, metal, earth) and use the words for moon and sun in naming Sunday and Monday. Both languages combine those components with a 2nd component meaning day of the week. Table 1 shows the Japanese and Korean names in…… Continue reading Days of the week in East Asia

NSM Natural Semantic Metalanguage

Natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) is a linguistic theory claiming that: all lexical items (lexemes) in any human language are made up of a small number of simple concepts (‘semantic primes’); the semantic primes cannot be broken down into more basic concepts; the semantic primes are universal: the same semantic primes underlie every language. Also, for each…… Continue reading NSM Natural Semantic Metalanguage

Language in Project Hail Mary

Last week, I saw the new Ryan Gosling film Project Hail Mary. It highlights some interesting questions about how a human can learn to communicate with an extraterrestrial. The film is based on a 2021 sci-fi novel of the same name by Andy Weir.   Ryan Gosling’s character Ryland Grace is a scientist on a…… Continue reading Language in Project Hail Mary

Numbers in Japanese and Chinese

Japanese has 2 series of words for numbers: words borrowed from Chinese many centuries ago (Sino-Japanese numbers); and native Japanese numbers Table 1 shows the numbers from 1 to 10, as well as the words for zero, 100, 1,000, 10,000, 100 million, 1012 and 1016. For comparison, I have included the pronunciations of the numbers…… Continue reading Numbers in Japanese and Chinese

Idiomatic negative adjectives in Japanese

In Japanese, the negator nai often combines with verbs to derive idiomatic adjectives which can appear only in a negative form. Table 1 lists some of them. Table 1. Adjectives formed with the negator -nai AdjectiveComponentsMeaningtamara-naibear-negcannot standyarikire-nai  finish-negcannot stand, unbearabledoozi-nai  upset-negnot upsetniekira-nai  decisive-negindecisivewarikire-naisatisfy-negnot satisfiedkamawa-nai  care-negnot carekudara-naiworth-negworthless, uninterestingtsumara-naiinterest-negboring, uninterestingkakase-nailack-negnecessarykakasa-nai  miss-negnever lacksoguwa-nai  fit-negunsuitableyuruga-nai  shake-negfirm, solidhakarisire-nai  measure-negimmeasurablenorikire-nairide-negnot in…… Continue reading Idiomatic negative adjectives in Japanese

Lateral consonants

Lateral consonants are consonants produced with the tongue blocking (or nearly blocking) the airflow in the centre of the mouth but allowing air to flow around the side(s) of the tongue. English has one lateral phoneme: /l/, written as <l> or <L>. Definition Ladefoged and Maddieson (1996) define laterals as sounds ‘in which the tongue…… Continue reading Lateral consonants

Heads, complements, specifiers and adjuncts

Theories of syntax do not view analyse sentences as an unstructured sequence of words. Instead, they analyse sentences down into immediate constituents, and then further down into sub-constituents and ultimately down into single words. For example: the sentence Jane helps John might be analysed down into the immediate constituents Jane and helps John; and the…… Continue reading Heads, complements, specifiers and adjuncts

Phonemes and allophones

Phonologists and phoneticians typically distinguish phonemes from allophones. A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that distinguishes one word from another word. For example, the English word mat is distinct from pat because mat starts with the phoneme /m/ whereas pat starts with the phoneme /p/. A phoneme is not always pronounced in the…… Continue reading Phonemes and allophones

Two ways to write some Japanese sounds

The 2 Japanese syllabaries (syllabic wiring systems) known as kana have 2 different ways of writing the sound [(d)ʑi] and also have 2 different ways of writing the sound [(d)zɯ]. I will first show how this works in the hiragana syllabary and then show briefly what the symbols are in the other syllabary (katakana). Hiragana…… Continue reading Two ways to write some Japanese sounds