Re: Verbs as Adjectives - Reply and Thanks. :)

On Tue, 13 Jul 2004 13:32:04 +0100, Chris Bates
<chris.maths_student@...> wrote:
> I love the look of the Hiragana though... its a very nice
> syllablary (how do you spell that word!?!?!), but the Kanji in the
> middle spoil the look of written Japanese. They're much uglier than the
> Hiragana.
OTOH, due to the large number of homophones (mostly due to borrowings
from Chinese, and without the benefit of tones for disambiguation),
kanji make it easier to read Japanese IMO. (They also help to segment
the writing stream, I find, since Japanese doesn't use spaces in
writing - but to a first approximation, kanji after hiragana = start
of a new 'word'. Korean, on the other hand, uses spaces, which is
probably just as well since it also has the homophone problem a bit
but uses very few, if any, hanja in normal writing.)

Japanese can be, and is, written all in hiragana - mostly for
schoolchildren who are beginning to read.

>  I've included an optional plural affix, but since Japanese gets by
> perfectly well without any plural affixes for most nouns (I think
> there's a plural form for the noun "person" isn't there? And a couple of
> other nouns... along with the pronouns) I'm thinking about ditching any
> grammatical indication of plurality and simply having a verb/adjective
> "to be many" which people can use if they want.
Or just leaving it to context, the way Chinese (and usually Japanese,
for that matter) does: if there's a number, it's obviously plural; if
not, use context.

Have you considered using measure words, à la Chinese/Japanese, as
well? To give it something that's not so common in SAE languages.
Think "three head of cattle", only ubiquitous and mandatory when
counting anything.

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>