4 ms·

Yes, they are different from English. In English you say "one herd of cattle", "two herds of cattle", and so on. You just need to know a plural of "herd" and th

by Grue3 9y ago

Yes, they are different from English. In English you say "one herd of cattle", "two herds of cattle", and so on. You just need to know a plural of "herd" and the regular numbers. In Japanese the numbers themselves depend on the counter. You can't say "one day", "two days", "three days". You can only say "one day (ichinichi)", "foobar (futsuka)", "bazbar (mikka)", and so on. And this counting system is used pretty much only for days. Except similar words to "foo" and "baz" here are also used to count some things. But not the others. Also the rules of combining a numeral and the counter are very inconsistent. Here's my implementation of Japanese counters, suffices to say the English version would be like 5 lines of code: https://github.com/tshatrov/ichiran/blob/master/dict-counters.lisp https://github.com/tshatrov/ichiran/blob/master/dict-counter... And here's the pronounciation generator for so called "regular" numbers. https://github.com/tshatrov/ichiran/blob/master/numbers.lisp#L82 https://github.com/tshatrov/ichiran/blob/master/numbers.lisp... I.e. 1000 = issen (ichi+sen) 3000 = sanzen (san + sen), 800 = happyaku (hachi + hyaku).

yorwba 9y ago
The completely different number words used for some things are actually not related to the counter, although it may appear like that because the written form uses the Chinese-style number + counter system. The spoken words are holdouts from ancient Japanese (before Chinese become influential), which TFA discusses separately. The situation is similar to Latin or Greek numerals in English, which are also applied pretty inconsistently. E.g. duplicate, triplicate, quadruple, ... but pair, triple, quadruple, ... In general, all languages are riddled with exceptions, ambiguities, contradictions and archaic forms, but it's easier to notice them when you're learning the language later in life and have the "logical" structures of your mother-tongue to compare them to.

by Grue3 9y ago

yorwba 9y ago

The completely different number words used for some things are actually not related to the counter, although it may appear like that because the written form uses the Chinese-style number + counter system. The spoken words are holdouts from ancient Japanese (before Chinese become influential), which TFA discusses separately. The situation is similar to Latin or Greek numerals in English, which are also applied pretty inconsistently. E.g. duplicate, triplicate, quadruple, ... but pair, triple, quadruple, ... In general, all languages are riddled with exceptions, ambiguities, contradictions and archaic forms, but it's easier to notice them when you're learning the language later in life and have the "logical" structures of your mother-tongue to compare them to.