151–155 of 155 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey, it was a joke - though maybe not a good one, Forth-syntax-wise. Just something I quickly came up with. I actually know Forth a bit. Had played around with it some earlier.
Oh, I see. Sorry. Dense very I was being. :-)
This article does a great job at presenting a gist of the Japanese sentence structure. Nevertheless, it makes me want to point out that it's not the whole story. If you take into account topics such as modality and conjugation, some of the information you add to a verb is placed after the verb and cannot be freely reordered. Japanese verbs are "greater" than English verbs in the sense that you conjugate/suffixate a v…
Why do you use nemuru as the root? Mostly I would hear and say neru. So I could not sleep would become nerarenakatta.
Neru tends to indicate more intentional sleep (arranging to go to sleep: deciding to retire to bed, to lie down etc), whereas nemuru is spontaneous sleep (falling asleep --- and not necessarily lying down).
"Nerarenakatta" has the possible interpretation of something like, "I couldn't sleep (because of no opportunity to get away from activity and lie down)" whereas "nemurenakatta" is "I couldn't fall asleep" (insomnia).
I think if you stayed up all night studying and so because of that you couldn't sleep, that's when you might best use "nerarenakatta". I couldn't sleep (because I needed to do something else with the time, not due to failure to fall asleep).
A interesting property of Japanese is that a sentence is also a subordinate clause. For example Tarou wa Noriko wo toshokan de mimashita. (Tarou saw Noriko at the library.) Tarou wa Noriko wo mimashita. (Tarou saw Noriko.) Tarou wa Noriko wo mimashita toshokan (The library where Tarou saw Noriko) Generally " " means "the such that is true for some choice of ".
1. You can't topicalise the subject of a subordinate clause. 2. Only plain form is valid for verbs in a subordinate clause. (maybe the particle "kara" could be seen as an exception here)
"anata ga kukkii wo taberu no wo mita yo" (I saw you eat the cookie)
"Anata" is now the subject of a subordinate clause.
I think it can be topicalized (in the sense of becoming the grammatical topic, marked by ha) like this:
"Anata ha, kukkii wo taberu no wo mita yo". (As for you, I saw (you) eat the cookie.)
The subordinate clause now has an unspecified/implicit subject, and that identifies with the topic that was introduced.
I think an extraposition of "anata" (into a non-topical position) is possible like this, where subordinate clause minus its subject is now the topic:
"kukkii wo taberu no wo mita ha, anata da yo". (the one I saw eating the cookie is you)
I've personally been happy with the following books as well: Bungo Manual: Selected Reference Materials for Students of Classical Japanese Classical Japanese Reader and Essential Dictionary Classical Japanese: A Grammar
Many of the confusing rules we have today (i-adjectives vs na-adjectives, different verb conjugation classes, etc.) are subsets of much larger rule-sets from early in the language's written history. Bound particles are probably the most confusing of these rules, which were too convoluted to survive over time, but still inform common usage patterns today.
The Japanese language (particularly its written form) is very young, so it's actually feasible to gain an in-depth understanding of the language's entire history without spending a decade on a doctorate.