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The honorifics -chan and -sama may also be used instead of -san, to express a higher level of closeness or reverence, respectively. The general rule is that a younger family member (e.g., a young brother) addresses an older family member (e.g., a big sister) using an honorific form, while the more senior family member calls the younger one only ...
Japanese uses honorific constructions to show or emphasize social rank, social intimacy or similarity in rank. The choice of pronoun used, for example, will express the social relationship between the person speaking and the person being referred to, and Japanese often avoids pronouns entirely in favor of more explicit titles or kinship terms.
Shoyuu (所有) is a Japanese noun of Sino-Japanese origin. It translates as ‘the state of possession’ or ‘ownership’. In Japanese, nouns, mainly those of Chinese origin, may attach themselves to the verb suru (する), ‘to do’, to form a compound verb. The verb ‘to come to possess/own’, shoyuusuru, is formed in this manner.
Conversely, pronouns are closed classes in Western languages but open classes in Japanese and some other East Asian languages. In a few cases historically, and much more commonly recently, new verbs are created by appending the suffix-ru (〜る) to a noun or using it to replace the end of a word.
Some forms rather more familiar to Modern Japanese speakers begin to appear – the continuative ending -te begins to reduce onto the verb (e.g. yonde for earlier yomite), the -k- in the final mora of adjectives drops out (shiroi for earlier shiroki); and some forms exist where modern standard Japanese has retained the earlier form (e.g. hayaku ...
In Japanese, virtually all nouns must use a counter to express number because Japanese lacks singular/plural morphology. [4] [3] In this sense, virtually all Japanese nouns are mass nouns. This grammatical feature can result in situations where one is unable to express the number of a particular object in a syntactically correct way because one ...
Generally, to express past or negative forms, additional other words or syntax are added to the sentence rather than using the full verb paradigm. However, nevertheless, taru-adjectives do have a full verb paradigm with six bases that obeys the grammar surrounding verbs in Japanese, which may be used in archaic or highly formal speech.
Like other vowels, scaled-down versions of the kana (ぃ, ィ) are used to express sounds foreign to the Japanese language, such as フィ (fi).In some Okinawan writing systems, a small ぃ is also combined with the kana く (ku) and ふ to form the digraphs くぃ kwi and ふぃ hwi respectively, although the Ryukyu University system uses the kana ゐ/ヰ instead.