Talk:Japanese grammar

message: For the sake of consistency, can we please stick to just one of these terms throughout the article? It's okay to have a parenthetical mention such as, "Also called X," but after that we should be consistent in our usage and not flip-flop between the two terms.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 61.120.205.101 (talk) 23:52, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Adjectival Noun vs. Nominal Adjective 

message: From the article:
Grammatical cases in Japanese are marked by particles placed after the nouns. A distinctive feature of Japanese is the presence of two cases which are roughly equivalent to the nominative case in other languages: one representing the sentence topic, other representing the subject. The most important case markers are the following:
* Nominative -  (ga) for subject,  (wa) for the topic
* Genitive -  (no)
* Dative -  (ni)
* Accusative -  (wo)
* Lative -  (e), used for destination direction (like in "to some place")
* Ablative -  (kara), used for source direction (like in "from some place")
* Instrumental -  (de)
Although some authorities seem to describe particles in this way, personally I don't think it is helpful. I wouldn't call "noun + に" the "dative case" of a noun, any more than I would "to + noun" in English. Article Grammatical case says "Case is based fundamentally on changes to the noun to indicate the noun's role in the sentence. This is not how English works; instead, word order and prepositions are used to achieve this." I would say also "this is not how Japanese works". What do other people think? 109.145.59.124 (talk) 20:56, 3 August 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: The particles make much more of a difference than the word order does. In the English, "The dog bites the man," the word order is what determines who is biting whom. In the Japanese, 「犬は人を噛む」, it's the particles doing the work. 「人を犬は噛む」 means the same thing. "The man bites the dog," does not. 107.4.45.152 (talk) 03:56, 10 November 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Word order is really irrelevant. Particles in Japanese are not normally described as "cases"; the stuff at Grammatical case is almost totally unsourced, but I do not have access to the Takahashi grammar book: does anyone know exactly what he says? The case article claims that English does not have cases except remnants of the case system in pronouns; it is also claimed that the English possessive "'s" is not a case marker because it attaches to a syntactic constituent, as for example in "The King of Peru's nose", or "The King and I's closing scene" (not "The King and my closing scene"). Exactly the argument shows that Japanese particles are not case markers, because they attach to constituents. 説明するのが難しい: there is no cased noun (or any other part of speech). I have long contemplated just removing Japanese and Korean from the case article, because there is no evidence for the claims. Imaginatorium (talk) 13:11, 10 November 2020 (UTC)

text: I accept your quote that Tsujimura calls them "case particles", but do not believe that this is universal. The problem is that she is probably simply using "case" to refer to the nom-acc-dat arrangment of three possibilities for first ("subject-y") argument, direct ("object") argument and indirect ("object") argument. If this means that Japanese "has case", then exactly the same argument shows that English "has case", but everyone seems to agree that it doesn't. (Or if you like, "If 's is a clitic, then が is a clitic.) And while distinguishing these three sorts of "grammatical" argument maps to the standard cases, the particles have none of the standard properties of case-marking. They do not apply to nouns, adjectives, or any other part of speech, they attach to nominal phrases. And if you are allowed to lump in semantic words like から, English must have at least 15 cases, formed with "from", "under", "below" and so on and so on. Do any of the linguists answer any of my questions above? 説明するのが難しい: what does "case" apply to here? Imaginatorium (talk) 19:10, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Case particles are understood as a particular grammatical feature of Japanese intended to mark the case of various parts of speech. This view is, as far as I know, universal. There isn't a part of speech in English for the specific purpose of denoting case. If there is a linguist that doesn't call them Japanese case particles (kaku-joshi), I wouldn't mind including that view, but I'm not sure it actually exists. Ga, for instance, is universally recognized as denoting nominative case, including in the nominalized clause you created above. As Gisaburo Kiyose writes in Japanese Grammar - A New Approach: "A noun-substantive being in the nominative case with the suffix-ga indicates that the noun is the subject of the sentence. In written language, the nominative case suffix -ga must be added to the grammatical subject." Tikisim (talk) 03:23, 12 April 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cases 

message: I know this matter doesn't have to do with Japanese grammar, but I think it could use clearer terminology:
"The conjugation of i-adjectives has similarities to the conjugation of verbs, unlike Western languages where inflection of adjectives, where it exists, is more likely to have similarities to the declension of nouns. Verbs and adjectives being closely related is unusual from the perspective of English, but is a common case across languages generally, and one may consider Japanese adjectives as a kind of stative verb."
By "Western", does that paragraph technically mean Indo-European? Uralic languages like Hungarian and Finnish, which aren't Indo-European, can be considered "Western", but that doesn't necessarily mean that they have similarities aside from loanwords spread via geographic proximity. It gets even more ambiguous since Turkic or Afro-Asiatic (such as Semitic) languages would definitely be considered Western from a Japanese perspective, but aren't really considered Western in the usual sense. 
ThighFish (talk) 04:09, 20 April 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Small change 

message: This section seems to require, for any kind of understanding, knowledge that is not to be found anywhere on this page. Could it perhaps be moved to the Japanese adjectives article, for example? Or else, could extra information about these adjectives be included in this page, to make that section meaningful? Or perhaps both? W. P. Uzer (talk) 21:38, 13 January 2022 (UTC)
thread_title: Section titled Controversy over the characterization of nominal adjectives

message: Many (but not all) of the example sentences in the "Particles" section have capitalized words in the romanization, apparently reflecting the fact that those words are written in katakana (which seems to me irrelevant to the topic of that section). Is this standard? necessary? W. P. Uzer (talk) 07:12, 16 June 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: It is neither standard, nor necessary, and not in any obvious way helpful at all. Though it is the sort of thing you see quite often. Like John being called "JON", instead of the more natural "Jon-san" in the later examples. Imaginatorium (talk) 05:41, 17 June 2022 (UTC)
thread_title: Capitals for romanization of katakana