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This site seems to make a big deal about not following standard terms for Japanese grammar, eg. calling 形容詞 "na-nouns" instead of "na-adjectives" and 形容動詞 "i-ve

This site seems to make a big deal about not following standard terms for Japanese grammar, eg. calling 形容詞 "na-nouns" instead of "na-adjectives" and 形容動詞 "i-verbs" instead of "i-adjectives". It's rather unclear to me why? I get that if you only speak English it may seem weird to you that some adjectives are conjugated (akai "red", akakunai not red), but I'm not sure calling them "verbs" is particularly helpful.

edflsafoiewq 6y ago
I think it's a good first intuition that words are either noun-like, which do not conjugate and combine using particles, or verb-like, which do conjugate and combine by juxtaposition.
- presentation 6y ago
  When I was first learning Japanese, the way people taught these concepts definitely felt suspicious - while verbs and adjectives is how we’d explain the concepts in English, the terms don’t seem to fit as neatly into Japanese - unsurprising given that the classification comes from a different linguistic tradition. This seems to focus more on how these forms conjugate, as you mentioned. That said, my intuition is that this format might produce equally as confusing patterns.
bdowling 6y ago
> This site seems to make a big deal about not following standard terms for Japanese grammar, eg. calling 形容詞 "na-nouns" instead of "na-adjectives" and 形容動詞 "i-verbs" instead of "i-adjectives". The site is wrong. 形容詞 are the "i-adjectives" and 形容動詞 are the "na-adjectives". [0] It's not a good indicator of quality that the authors mixed up the traditional grammatical terms on a site promoting an alternative grammar for Japanese learners. [0] See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjectival_noun_(Japanese) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjectival_noun_(Japanese)
- sova 6y ago
  Thank you good catch. Yes, they were flipped unfortunately.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
naniwaduni 6y ago
Classifying the 形容動詞 stem as a noun is kind of nice for ... not getting a very confused intuition on what they do and how they work, because they really are more like 名詞 and/or nouns in most senses†. Choosing to classify 形容詞 as a kind of verb is a bit of an odder, best-kind-of-correct sort of take, since their conjugation paradigm is a bit removed from the usual "verb" paradigms, and it makes me kind of wonder whether they'd call the stems of サ変 compounds "su(ru)-nouns". But it's kind of a logical step to jump to if you're going to call 形容動詞 "na-nouns", I guess. (The page gets 形容動詞 and 形容詞 mixed up, though, which isn't a great sign.) As for why you'd want to avoid calling them adjectives, basically, calling both "adjectives" would make it sound like these two groups kinds of lemmas make up a coherent lexical category. At least for anglophones, "adjective" is a word that only comes when discussing "grammar", and that carries the implication that the "adjective" classification has something to do with "grammar". It's not. There is no morphological similarity between 形容詞 and 形容動詞; the similarity between them is purely semantic (and rather tenuous at that). The similarity between them and adjectives is likewise semantic, not morphological: they happen to be groupings of mostly descriptive words. And adjectives, likewise, happen to be a grouping of mostly descriptive words. But the word "adjective" reaches at a different characterizing property that makes bad abstraction: "adjectives" are actually almost a coherent word class. Frankly, seeing the contortions people hallucinate up when they bring preconceived notions about how "adjectives" work, I can kind of sympathize with an attempt to drill in the point that 形容動詞 stems are basically nouns, 形容詞 are basically verbs, and avoid all the nonsense around the concept of "adjectives". †There are a few features where nouns that refer to descriptive traits often differ from nouns that describe concrete objects (not to mention all the grammatical nouns—to wit, every single loanword—that are harder to classify as "things"), but the ability to form a 連体形 with -な certainly doesn't make a clean cut of them. There are at least fair few that prefer to take -の while being semantically descriptive, for one, and a handful of more exotic types.
- idiocrat 6y ago
  If I would have had a second life, I would then have read this excellent book many times, from cover to cover. It is a trove of information for deeper understanding of historic (and then modern) grammar. An historical grammar of Japanese (1928) By Sir Sansom, George Bailey https://archive.org/details/historicalgramma00sansuoft/page/214/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/historicalgramma00sansuoft/page/...
nullsense 6y ago
It's always fun in Japanese when people flip conjugations by tacking nakunai on the end like you make a statement "akakunai" "it's not red" and they, disagreeing with you in disbelief, fire back "akakunakunai?" Like "it ain't not red!" but it's phrased as a question intonation-wise. Japanese is a lot of fun.
sova 6y ago
Yes they are verbs in the sense that the object is not "red" but "actively red'ing" -- if one looks at the onomatopoetic language of Japanese it becomes clear that many things are memetic and more similar to the "live photo" transient glimpse of motion than a static trait.

edflsafoiewq 6y ago

I think it's a good first intuition that words are either noun-like, which do not conjugate and combine using particles, or verb-like, which do conjugate and combine by juxtaposition.

presentation 6y ago
When I was first learning Japanese, the way people taught these concepts definitely felt suspicious - while verbs and adjectives is how we’d explain the concepts in English, the terms don’t seem to fit as neatly into Japanese - unsurprising given that the classification comes from a different linguistic tradition. This seems to focus more on how these forms conjugate, as you mentioned. That said, my intuition is that this format might produce equally as confusing patterns.

bdowling 6y ago

> This site seems to make a big deal about not following standard terms for Japanese grammar, eg. calling 形容詞 "na-nouns" instead of "na-adjectives" and 形容動詞 "i-verbs" instead of "i-adjectives". The site is wrong. 形容詞 are the "i-adjectives" and 形容動詞 are the "na-adjectives". [0] It's not a good indicator of quality that the authors mixed up the traditional grammatical terms on a site promoting an alternative grammar for Japanese learners. [0] See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjectival_noun_(Japanese) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjectival_noun_(Japanese)

sova 6y ago
Thank you good catch. Yes, they were flipped unfortunately.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

naniwaduni 6y ago

Classifying the 形容動詞 stem as a noun is kind of nice for ... not getting a very confused intuition on what they do and how they work, because they really are more like 名詞 and/or nouns in most senses†. Choosing to classify 形容詞 as a kind of verb is a bit of an odder, best-kind-of-correct sort of take, since their conjugation paradigm is a bit removed from the usual "verb" paradigms, and it makes me kind of wonder whether they'd call the stems of サ変 compounds "su(ru)-nouns". But it's kind of a logical step to jump to if you're going to call 形容動詞 "na-nouns", I guess. (The page gets 形容動詞 and 形容詞 mixed up, though, which isn't a great sign.) As for why you'd want to avoid calling them adjectives, basically, calling both "adjectives" would make it sound like these two groups kinds of lemmas make up a coherent lexical category. At least for anglophones, "adjective" is a word that only comes when discussing "grammar", and that carries the implication that the "adjective" classification has something to do with "grammar". It's not. There is no morphological similarity between 形容詞 and 形容動詞; the similarity between them is purely semantic (and rather tenuous at that). The similarity between them and adjectives is likewise semantic, not morphological: they happen to be groupings of mostly descriptive words. And adjectives, likewise, happen to be a grouping of mostly descriptive words. But the word "adjective" reaches at a different characterizing property that makes bad abstraction: "adjectives" are actually almost a coherent word class. Frankly, seeing the contortions people hallucinate up when they bring preconceived notions about how "adjectives" work, I can kind of sympathize with an attempt to drill in the point that 形容動詞 stems are basically nouns, 形容詞 are basically verbs, and avoid all the nonsense around the concept of "adjectives". †There are a few features where nouns that refer to descriptive traits often differ from nouns that describe concrete objects (not to mention all the grammatical nouns—to wit, every single loanword—that are harder to classify as "things"), but the ability to form a 連体形 with -な certainly doesn't make a clean cut of them. There are at least fair few that prefer to take -の while being semantically descriptive, for one, and a handful of more exotic types.

idiocrat 6y ago
If I would have had a second life, I would then have read this excellent book many times, from cover to cover. It is a trove of information for deeper understanding of historic (and then modern) grammar. An historical grammar of Japanese (1928) By Sir Sansom, George Bailey https://archive.org/details/historicalgramma00sansuoft/page/214/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/historicalgramma00sansuoft/page/...

nullsense 6y ago

It's always fun in Japanese when people flip conjugations by tacking nakunai on the end like you make a statement "akakunai" "it's not red" and they, disagreeing with you in disbelief, fire back "akakunakunai?" Like "it ain't not red!" but it's phrased as a question intonation-wise. Japanese is a lot of fun.

sova 6y ago

Yes they are verbs in the sense that the object is not "red" but "actively red'ing" -- if one looks at the onomatopoetic language of Japanese it becomes clear that many things are memetic and more similar to the "live photo" transient glimpse of motion than a static trait.