The national language of Japan, member of the small Japonic language family, otherwise considered to be isolated.
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Is it accurate - Chinese Wikipedia on Japanese/Korean classification
I'm not very updated on random theories regarding the Altaic theory (which I personally am agnostic about; though I slant towards not believing in it due to the extreme lack of any regular sound ...
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1answer
55 views
Basic resource on japanese phonetics
Could you recommend a good reference for studying Japanese phonetics?
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119 views
Relationship between Turkish/Azeri and Japanese/Korean
How are Turkish and Azeri related to Japanese and Korean? Are there obvious similarities between them?
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91 views
Discourse analysis of Japanese particles?
Have there been any English language attempts (preferably readily-available) to define Japanese particles from the perspective of discourse analysis? Some of the things I would be interested to see ...
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2answers
154 views
What is the maximum number of forms a (modern) Japanese verb can take?
Recently I've begun to wonder how many possible forms can be made from a single Japanese verb.
I asked a similar question first on the Japanese Language & Usage site, where I received some ...
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Good free books on Japanese grammar fundamentals [closed]
I'm looking for some good (free if available) books or materials on Japanese grammar fundamentals in the Internet. Ideally the ones in the context of NLP for Japanese. There is a lot of free material, ...
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1answer
159 views
Is the concept of syllables pronunciation-relevant in languages with mora-based pronunciation?
Japanese pronunciation is mora-based (correct me if there is a better word), i.e. each mora is pronounced with equal length.
Still I sometimes see the concept of syllables used, e.g.
疲労 /hirō/ ...
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3answers
697 views
What languages lack personal pronouns, and why?
The Japanese language lacks personal pronouns in the IE sense. Japanese is very pro-drop, and often sentences will be constructed so personal pronouns do not appear, and the agents which the pronouns ...
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214 views
Suppletion vs. missing verb forms
Japanese is famous for its very few irregular verbs, but there are some cases where verb-forms are missing and other verbs/adjectives are used instead.
For example, (in standard Japanese) the verb ある ...
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217 views
Is grammar the main barrier to Japanese people understanding English?
Although a much higher proportion of Japanese people understand English than people from English-speakering countries understand Japanese, it isn't as high as the Scandinavian countries.
I wouldn't ...
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3answers
179 views
How common is a topic particle beyond just Japanese and Korean?
Both Japanese and Korean are "topic-comment" languages and both have an explicit topic particle.
(I believe Chinese might be an example of a topic-comment language without a topic particle but I may ...
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1answer
211 views
Are there other pairs of languages that are as close grammatically despite not being in the same language family as Korean and Japanese?
Though there are many theories grouping Korean and Japanese in the same family, none of these are widely accepted by linguists.
Yet the grammars of these two languages are extremely similar in many ...
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2answers
254 views
In Japanese, why do certain consonants change depending on the vowel?
I was wondering why in Japanese, certain consonants change depending on the vowel. For example:
Consonants that do not change:
ka / ki / ku / ke / ko
na / ni / nu / ne / no
Consonants that do ...
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5answers
511 views
Does Japanese have determiners?
It's generally established that Japanese does not have the grammatical category of articles (akin to English "a/an" and "the").
But as mentioned in this answer, the concept of articles seems to be ...
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354 views
Are the Japanese and Korean subject particles known to be related in any way?
Japanese and Korean have strikingly similar grammars but whether they are related or not is an open question.
Both languages have a particle to mark the grammatical subject of a sentence and in fact ...
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4answers
308 views
Are there any papers etc analyzing Japanese as a language with noun cases rather than particles?
Japanese is often included in lists of agglutinating languages.
Many (most?) agglutinating languages are analysed as having case systems.
Of course cases and prepositions/postpositions fill the same ...
