Category talk:Japanese の-no adjectives

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Category:Japanese の-no adjectives

This site has pretty much settled on not including these. In dictionaries where they are included, it is party as an aid to learners, because they can often be translated into adjectives. For people unfamiliar with Japanese grammar that can be a big help, but in reality they are a noun plus the particle -no, which makes them a predictable sum of their parts. Nearly any noun could be made into a so-called "-no adjective" and any "-no adjective" can be broken down into a noun plus a particle. --Haplology (talk) 14:51, 22 March 2013 (UTC)

I don't know much about Japanese, but isn't -no the genitive ending? We include genitives of other languages, why not Japanese? —CodeCat 15:04, 22 March 2013 (UTC)

I think, based purely on other people's comments, it's analogous to calling cat's and cats' English genitives. Mglovesfun (talk) 16:35, 22 March 2013 (UTC)

• A genitive case usually involves some sort of morphological change in the term, and possibly in other terms dependent on that term. For instance, English he becomes his and she becomes her; German das Haus becomes des Hauses. Meanwhile, Japanese 彼 (kare, “he”) and 彼女 (kanojo, “she”) become just 彼 or 彼女 + の (no, possessive particle), and 住宅 (jūtaku, “house, residence”) becomes just 住宅 + の (no, possessive particle), with no changes to either the terms themselves or other terms in the sentence.

What are sometimes called "case particles" in Japanese are effectively separate little words, a bit like the little words the or a or to in English, that help give grammatical structure to a sentence. So any [term] + [particle] is essentially SOP, unless it's evolved some kind of specific idiomatic meaning, such as いつも (itsumo, itsu mo, “always, whenever; usually”). This decomposes to いつ (itsu, “when”) + particle も (mo, “even, also, too”), but idiomatically behaves in modern Japanese as a single unit with some uses that are not SOP.

So with the exception of idiomatically distinct combinations like いつも (itsumo, itsu mo), I would generally oppose including [term] + [particle] for Japanese, much as I'm sure others would oppose including non-idiomatic [article] + [term] or [preposition] + [article] + [term] as lemmata for English.

Ok, I understand, I think I agree with deleting it. But just to note, there is certainly not always a morphological change. In Finnish for example, the situation is a bit like Japanese where you just attach an ending to a word: talo + -n. There are sometimes changes in the stem, but it's still the same principle. —CodeCat 17:34, 22 March 2013 (UTC)

• Interesting about Finnish. Does the pronunciation of the suffixed syllable or word change at all? Like maybe /ˈtɑlo̞/ > /taˈlɔn/?

No, it stays the same. Other endings are attached in the same way. And let's not forget about Esperanto, which also works the same way but even more regularly than Finnish because it has no stem changes whatsoever anywhere in the language, only direct suffixation. —CodeCat 17:45, 22 March 2013 (UTC)

• Hmm, it looks like there are different noun types in Finnish: although the genitive is formed as a simple suffixing of -n for talo, there are more complicated mechanisms at work for rakennus. Japanese doesn't have any of that -- adding a particle doesn't change the form of the preceding word, no matter the particle, no matter the word. This might be partly why Japanese particles have often historically been treated as a separate class of word, rather than just as a suffixing element or traditional case structure. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 17:59, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

• Regarding the Category:Japanese の-no adjectives itself, the cat is empty, and not really grammatically valid anyway, for the reasons Haplology outlines above. Delete. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 16:40, 22 March 2013 (UTC)

Gone. Mglovesfun (talk) 14:58, 10 April 2013 (UTC)