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In linguistics, a numeral in the broadest sense is a word or phrase that describes a numerical quantity. Some theories of grammar use the word "numeral" to refer to cardinal numbers that act as a determiner that specify the quantity of a noun, for example the "two" in "two hats". Some theories of grammar do not include determiners as a part of speech and consider "two" in this example to be an adjective. Some theories consider "numeral" to be a synonym for "number" and assign all numbers to a part of speech called "numerals". Numerals in the broad sense can also be analyzed as a noun, as a pronoun, or for a small number of words as an adverb.
An adjective is a word that describes or defines a noun or noun phrase. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun.
Kanji are the logographic Chinese characters adapted from the Chinese script used in the writing of Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are still used, along with the subsequently-derived syllabic scripts of hiragana and katakana. The characters have Japanese pronunciations; most have two, with one based on the Chinese sound. A few characters were invented in Japan by constructing character components derived from other Chinese characters. After the Meiji Restoration, Japan made its own efforts to simplify the characters, now known as shinjitai, by a process similar to China's simplification efforts, with the intention to increase literacy among the common folk. Since the 1920s, the Japanese government has published character lists periodically to help direct the education of its citizenry through the myriad Chinese characters that exist. There are nearly 3,000 kanji used in Japanese names and in common communication.
In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech is a category of words that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are assigned to the same part of speech generally display similar syntactic behavior, 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.
In linguistics and etymology, suppletion is traditionally understood as the use of one word as the inflected form of another word when the two words are not cognate. For those learning a language, suppletive forms will be seen as "irregular" or even "highly irregular". For example, go:went is a suppletive paradigm, because go and went are not etymologically related, whereas mouse:mice is irregular but not suppletive, since the two words come from the same proto-Indo-European ancestor.
Sino-Japanese vocabulary, also known as kango, is a subset of Japanese vocabulary that originated in Chinese or was created from elements borrowed from Chinese. Some grammatical structures and sentence patterns can also be identified as Sino-Japanese.
Kun'yomi, is a reading based on the pronunciation of a native Japanese word, or yamato kotoba, that closely approximated the meaning of the corresponding Chinese character when it was introduced.
On'yomi, or the Sino-Japanese reading, is the reading of a kanji based on the historical Chinese pronunciation of the character. A single kanji might have multiple on'yomi pronunciations reflecting the Chinese pronunciations of different periods or regions. On'yomi are generally classified into go-on, kan-on, tō-on and kan'yō-on.
Okurigana are kana suffixes following kanji stems in Japanese written words. They serve two purposes: to inflect adjectives and verbs, and to force a particular kanji to have a specific meaning and be read a certain way. For example, the plain verb form 見る inflects to past tense 見た, where 見 is the kanji stem, and る and た are okurigana, written in hiragana script. With very few exceptions, okurigana are only used for kun'yomi, not for on'yomi, as Chinese morphemes do not inflect in Japanese, and their pronunciation is inferred from context, since many are used as parts of compound words (kango).
Kanbun is a system for writing Literary Chinese used in Japan from the Nara period until the 20th century. Much of Japanese literature was written in this style and it was the general writing style for official and intellectual works throughout the period. As a result, Sino-Japanese vocabulary makes up a large portion of the Japanese lexicon and much classical Chinese literature is accessible to Japanese readers in some resemblance of the original.
The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana. Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalized Japanese words and grammatical elements; and katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis. Almost all written Japanese sentences contain a mixture of kanji and kana. Because of this mixture of scripts, in addition to a large inventory of kanji characters, the Japanese writing system is considered to be one of the most complicated currently in use.
In modern Japanese, ateji principally refers to kanji used to phonetically represent native or borrowed words with less regard to the underlying meaning of the characters. This is similar to man'yōgana in Old Japanese. Conversely, ateji also refers to kanji used semantically without regard to the readings.
In phonology, apocope is the loss (elision) of a word-final vowel. In a broader sense, the term can refer to the loss of any final sound from a word.
This article deals with Japanese equivalents of English adjectives.
In descriptions of the Japanese language, an adjectival noun, adjectival, or na-adjective is a noun that can function as an adjective by taking the particle 〜な -na. Adjectival nouns constitute one of several Japanese word classes that can be considered equivalent to adjectives.
Early Middle Japanese is a stage of the Japanese language between 794 and 1185, which is known as the Heian period (平安時代). The successor to Old Japanese (上代日本語), it is also known as Late Old Japanese. However, the term "Early Middle Japanese" is preferred, as it is closer to Late Middle Japanese than to Old Japanese.
In linguistics, ordinal numerals or ordinal number words are words representing position or rank in a sequential order; the order may be of size, importance, chronology, and so on. They differ from cardinal numerals, which represent quantity and other types of numerals.
An attributive verb is a verb that modifies a noun in the manner of an attributive adjective, rather than express an independent idea as a predicate.
Wago are native Japanese words, meaning those words in Japanese that have been inherited from Old Japanese, rather than being borrowed at some stage. Together with kango (漢語) and gairaigo (外来語), they form one of the three main sources of Japanese words. They are also known as yamato kotoba.
References
- ↑ Vsauce (2014-08-12), Dord., archived from the original on 2021-12-17, retrieved 2017-08-01
- ↑ "Numbers in Japanese". www.omniglot.com. Retrieved 2017-08-01.
- Funk and Wagnalls Standard Desk Dictionary (1984) Harper and Row
- G. Jan Wilms, "Computerizing a Machine Readable Dictionary", in Proceedings of the 28th annual [ACM] Southeast regional conference, 1990
- Tetsuya Koshiishi, "Collateral adjectives, Latinate vocabulary, and English morphology", in Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, January 2002.
- "The typology of suppletion", a chapter in David Beck (2006) Aspects of the theory of morphology