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I'm not sure what the article is trying to prove (haven't read the study source[1] yet). It's hard to understand these differences without knowing more about th

I'm not sure what the article is trying to prove (haven't read the study source[1] yet). It's hard to understand these differences without knowing more about the pragmatics and syntax of the Japanese language. In Japanese (at least from what I've gotten from my 4-years in University + a few trips to Japan), at lot is indeed left unsaid. The more common case for this from my experience is the null-subject/topic [2] (i.e. "Iku yo." literally means "go", however, depending on the context the topic and/or subject gets assumed and can mean something simple like "Let's (or let us) go." or something slightly more complicated like, "Let's go and eat over there." There is also multitude of verbose set phrases that occur in Japanese. Example: [V]-nakerebanaranai/-nakerebananarimasen, which roughly translates to "I must do [V]" where [V] is a verb. There are two instances of it because of the honorific/politeness deal with the language which makes sentence structures even more verbose. A quick comparison with the word "to eat" would yield: Tabenakerebanaranai/tabenakerebanarimasen with 9 and 10 syllables, respectively, compared to English's "I have to eat" which is less than half [4 syllables]. I can go on, but I doubt I'm qualified enough to give a small lesson on Japanese syntax. Hopefully, though, that sheds a little more light on this. [1] http://ohll.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/Pellegrino_2011_Language.pdf http://ohll.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/Pellegrino_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null-subject_language#Japanese_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null-subject_language#Japanese...

batista 15y ago
>In Japanese (at least from what I've gotten from my 4-years in University Studying Japanese literature or something similar for your degree, or just taking some class? Because the second implies an order or magnitude less insight on the language...
- ineedtosleep 15y ago
  Double major with Japanese and Linguistics, with more of a focus on applied linguistics. Aside from that, can you clarify more on: "Because the second implies an order or magnitude less insight on the language..."? If you mean that the difference in utterances is obvious, sure that can be argued: Doing loose translations with a paragraph of Japanese would probably convert down into a few sentences in English, again depending on context -- it'll be visually/audibly less. Conversely, a sentence or two in Japanese can potentially be translated into a longer block of English due to English requiring a certain syntax: I believe English is SVO/OSV (Subject-Verb-Object: I'll go there) whereas Japanese is SOV (Subject-Object-Verb). The reason I bring up the SVO/SOV/etc. types is that it's a pretty significant difference when comparing languages. Spanish, I believe, is similar to English in that they're both SVO: My name is ____, Mi nombre es ____ -- Similar syntax. On the other side of the spectrum, the Chinese language structure (again, not completely sure) allows for almost any arrangement of words and will yield different meanings depending on where words are positioned. So translating sentences like that into another language can be a good deal of work and produce more extraneous words.
  - batista 15y ago
    >Double major with Japanese and Linguistics, with more of a focus on applied linguistics. OK, that sounds qualified enought ;-) >Aside from that, can you clarify more on: "Because the second implies an order or magnitude less insight on the language..."? Oh, just asking about your involvement with Japanese, if it was just some foreign language class at uni (that almost everybody forgets much about later) or a major.
asynchrony 15y ago
In colloquial Japanese the "-nakerebanaranai" form is usually just abbreviated as "nakya". So a four-syllable equivalent to "I have to eat" would be "tabenakya".

batista 15y ago

>In Japanese (at least from what I've gotten from my 4-years in University Studying Japanese literature or something similar for your degree, or just taking some class? Because the second implies an order or magnitude less insight on the language...

ineedtosleep 15y ago
Double major with Japanese and Linguistics, with more of a focus on applied linguistics. Aside from that, can you clarify more on: "Because the second implies an order or magnitude less insight on the language..."? If you mean that the difference in utterances is obvious, sure that can be argued: Doing loose translations with a paragraph of Japanese would probably convert down into a few sentences in English, again depending on context -- it'll be visually/audibly less. Conversely, a sentence or two in Japanese can potentially be translated into a longer block of English due to English requiring a certain syntax: I believe English is SVO/OSV (Subject-Verb-Object: I'll go there) whereas Japanese is SOV (Subject-Object-Verb). The reason I bring up the SVO/SOV/etc. types is that it's a pretty significant difference when comparing languages. Spanish, I believe, is similar to English in that they're both SVO: My name is ____, Mi nombre es ____ -- Similar syntax. On the other side of the spectrum, the Chinese language structure (again, not completely sure) allows for almost any arrangement of words and will yield different meanings depending on where words are positioned. So translating sentences like that into another language can be a good deal of work and produce more extraneous words.
- batista 15y ago
  >Double major with Japanese and Linguistics, with more of a focus on applied linguistics. OK, that sounds qualified enought ;-) >Aside from that, can you clarify more on: "Because the second implies an order or magnitude less insight on the language..."? Oh, just asking about your involvement with Japanese, if it was just some foreign language class at uni (that almost everybody forgets much about later) or a major.

asynchrony 15y ago

In colloquial Japanese the "-nakerebanaranai" form is usually just abbreviated as "nakya". So a four-syllable equivalent to "I have to eat" would be "tabenakya".