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The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

8020japanese.com

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Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#81

Post by drdaeman »

risyasin wrote: post #80
whym wrote: post #19

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…

You should definitely see Turkish. it's belong to same family with Japanese. But verbs are even bigger. There are more variants as suffixes to the verbs. Sometimes a whole English sentence can be translated into one Turkish word. Have a look. "okutamadıklarımızdansınız" just one word. It means you are one of those who we can not make them read.

If you meant "family" in linguistic sense, then, no. Japanese is of Japonic languages family, and Turkish is of Turkic. The proposed Altaic family (which was a parent to both, in its expanded "Macro-Altaic" version) was discredited, and Japonic is generally classified as an isolate language family.

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#82

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

iamnotlarry wrote: post #8

I learned Japanese very much the same way I learn programming languages and found it to be very easy to learn spoken Japanese. As far as languages go, Japanese is structured a lot like a programming language. If you learn five or six "bunpo" or grammar rules, you can go a very long ways. Then, to improve, just add rules to your mastery. When I first learn any programming language I start with basics: variable binding…

If you're interested in learning to read Japanese, you should give it a shot. It's intimidating but pretty do-able. Set yourself up with flash cards (I suggest AnkiDroid) and you can be pretty good at reading hiragana and katakana within a week. Then, study kanji flash cards for an hour a day and you'll know all the common kanji before you know it. Try to memorize 10-25 kanji per day and you can learn all the jōyō kanji within a few months. If you spend a few minutes telling yourself a story about each radical and kanji as you study you'll have no trouble memorizing them.

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#83

Post by tgragnato »

pgt wrote: post #61
klodolph wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The name for what you're talking about is "morphological typology". Languages occupy a spectrum from analytic (words stay the same) to synthetic (words change). English is usually categorized as analytic, since we only have a few ways to change words: plural -s, past tense -ed, etc., and English has been getting more analytic over time. Other European languages are more synthetic (fusional), like French, German, Span…

Interesting. Considering language as a lever and a tool for thought, how do you think the position of a language on the analytic/synthetic spectrum affects its suitability for computer interpretation? Are there any major Japanese programming languages? It would seem to me that given our relatively primitive compilers, that 'analytic' languages offer simpler mediums for unambiguous programming, whereas 'synthetic' lan…

There's one pretty famous and you may already know it.

> Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.

> He has often said that he is “trying to make Ruby natural, not simple,” in a way that mirrors life.

> Building on this, he adds: Ruby is simple in appearance, but is very complex inside, just like our human body.

These will not be considered strictly scientific articles, but appear reasonable..

[http://carlosplusplus.github.io/blog/2013/08/01/ruby-and-the...] - [https://robots.thoughtbot.com/learning-japanese-the-rubyist-...]

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#84

Post by FatalBaboon »

pgt wrote: post #61
klodolph wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The name for what you're talking about is "morphological typology". Languages occupy a spectrum from analytic (words stay the same) to synthetic (words change). English is usually categorized as analytic, since we only have a few ways to change words: plural -s, past tense -ed, etc., and English has been getting more analytic over time. Other European languages are more synthetic (fusional), like French, German, Span…

Interesting. Considering language as a lever and a tool for thought, how do you think the position of a language on the analytic/synthetic spectrum affects its suitability for computer interpretation? Are there any major Japanese programming languages? It would seem to me that given our relatively primitive compilers, that 'analytic' languages offer simpler mediums for unambiguous programming, whereas 'synthetic' lan…

Ruby comes from Japan

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#85

Post by vram22 »

pgt wrote: post #61
klodolph wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The name for what you're talking about is "morphological typology". Languages occupy a spectrum from analytic (words stay the same) to synthetic (words change). English is usually categorized as analytic, since we only have a few ways to change words: plural -s, past tense -ed, etc., and English has been getting more analytic over time. Other European languages are more synthetic (fusional), like French, German, Span…

Interesting. Considering language as a lever and a tool for thought, how do you think the position of a language on the analytic/synthetic spectrum affects its suitability for computer interpretation? Are there any major Japanese programming languages? It would seem to me that given our relatively primitive compilers, that 'analytic' languages offer simpler mediums for unambiguous programming, whereas 'synthetic' lan…

>Interesting. Considering language as a lever and a tool for thought, how do you think the position of a language on the analytic/synthetic spectrum affects its suitability for computer interpretation?

Interesting question. I remember reading article many years ago in BYTE magazine, someone, maybe one of the regular columnists who wrote about programming languages, speculating that if a programming language came out of the Orient, it might be different in some interesting ways from existing ones, which mainly came from the West, I suppose, though of course there could have been Oriental contributors to existing ones. For a long time after that I never heard of any such language; then came Ruby.

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#86

Post by greggman »

Grue3 wrote: post #42
iamnotlarry wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Japanese, you learn a handful of rules to conjugate a verb. Then those rules always apply with no exceptions. In English, there are not set rules. Every case is special. What is the past tense form of 'shake'? 'see'? 'walk'? 'sleep'? 'eat'? 'speak'? 'sit'? 'seek'? 'work'? There are no rules. You basically have to memorize every word and all the possible ways it can morph. English possessive: 's or s' or ' or s, d…

You're forgetting that there are only 3 (three) verb conjugations in English, of which two are almost always the same. Only a finite number of verbs have irregular conjugations, so you just learn them along with vocabulary. In Japanese, the number of possible conjugations of all irregular verbs (copula, "suru", "kuru") is probably larger than the number of English irregular verbs that are commonly used. In fact, let'…

Counters exist in English.

"5 head of cattle" is exactly analogous to "ushi go tou" (牛五頭)

Most English counters have left common usage but the concept exists. Similar but not the same many people enjoy learning all the names for groups of animals I English. "A murder of crows" for example

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#87

Post by ThinkingGuy »

One minor quibble with the author's example sentences: They use "watashi wa hito desu" to mean "I am a person."

I'm not a native Japanese speaker, but I'm pretty sure that "hito" is only used to refer to other people, never to oneself (source: the excellent "Nihongo Notes" series by the Mizutanis).

Maybe watashi ha ningen desu 私は人間です (I am a human) would be a better example that still illustrates the grammar pattern.

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#88

Post by vram22 »

iamnotlarry wrote: post #8

I learned Japanese very much the same way I learn programming languages and found it to be very easy to learn spoken Japanese. As far as languages go, Japanese is structured a lot like a programming language. If you learn five or six "bunpo" or grammar rules, you can go a very long ways. Then, to improve, just add rules to your mastery. When I first learn any programming language I start with basics: variable binding…

I had an ex-colleague (a dev) who also knew Japanese well. He was doing Japanese English translation part-time in the same company. Later quit software to do translation full time. When I asked him how difficult it was for him to learn Japanese, he said that Japanese grammar was very similar to Marathi grammar (which, I'm guessing, may be similar to Hindi grammar). Wonder if any one else has observed the same points as him, even for the similarity of Japanese to some other language.

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#89

Post by stan_rogers »

pgt wrote: post #61
klodolph wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The name for what you're talking about is "morphological typology". Languages occupy a spectrum from analytic (words stay the same) to synthetic (words change). English is usually categorized as analytic, since we only have a few ways to change words: plural -s, past tense -ed, etc., and English has been getting more analytic over time. Other European languages are more synthetic (fusional), like French, German, Span…

Interesting. Considering language as a lever and a tool for thought, how do you think the position of a language on the analytic/synthetic spectrum affects its suitability for computer interpretation? Are there any major Japanese programming languages? It would seem to me that given our relatively primitive compilers, that 'analytic' languages offer simpler mediums for unambiguous programming, whereas 'synthetic' lan…

Well, APL is damned near polysynthetic, if that's your bag. But like Cree or Ojibwe, you won't really "speak" it fully, fluently and with nuance until adolescence.

Re: The Logic Behind Japanese Sentence Structure

#90

Post by vram22 »

iamnotlarry wrote: post #12

Remember those English diagramming classes everyone hated? I'm not very familiar with the education system in Japan, but I doubt they have diagramming classes. In Japanese, the diagramming is built into the language. You tag the subject, the direct object, the indirect object, etc. Everything gets markup. Which part of the sentence is the direct object? Uh... the part with the direct object tag hanging off it? Correc…

Sanskrit is very consistent in its rules too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit

We had it in school in grades 8-10 or so and I really enjoyed learning it. The grammar rules are fairly simple and there are not many of them, IIRC. Words can be made up out of smaller words by joining them together by simple rules.

Another interesting thing is that many words have multiple meanings, a fact that poet and prose writes in the Sanskrit literature leveraged heavily. So a passage of text can have multiple layers of meaning.

It is almost like a programming language where you compose bigger structures such as functions and classes out of the atomic elements of the language.

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