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The Japanese language makes use of a system of honorific speech, called keishō (敬称), which includes honorific suffixes and prefixes when talking to, or referring to others in a conversation. Suffixes are often gender-specific at the end of names, while prefixes are attached to the beginning of many nouns.
Japanese honorific titles, often simply called honorifics, consist of suffixes and prefixes when referring to others in a conversation. The system is very extensive, having its own special vocabulary and grammatical forms to express various levels of respectful, humble, and polite speech.
Certain inflectional suffixes, in themselves, take on the form of verbs or i‑adjectives. These suffixes can then be further conjugated by adopting one of the verb bases, followed by the attachment of the appropriate suffix. The agglutinative nature of Japanese verb conjugation can thus make the final form of a given verb conjugation quite long.
By contrast, in Old Japanese -shiki (〜しき) adjectives (precursors of present i-adjectives ending in -shi-i (〜しい), formerly a different word class) were open, as reflected in words like ita-ita-shi-i (痛々しい, pitiful), from the adjective ita-i (痛い, painful, hurt), and kō-gō-shi-i (神々しい, heavenly, sublime), from the ...
Japanese particles, joshi (助詞) or tenioha (てにをは), are suffixes or short words in Japanese grammar that immediately follow the modified noun, verb, adjective, or sentence. Their grammatical range can indicate various meanings and functions, such as speaker affect and assertiveness.
Analogous orthographic conventions find occasional use in English, which, being more familiar, help in understanding okurigana. As an inflection example, when writing Xing for cross-ing, as in Ped Xing (pedestrian crossing), the -ing is a verb suffix, while cross is the dictionary form of the verb – in this case cross is the reading of the character X, while -ing is analogous to okurigana.
In some Japanese dictionaries, the readings of conjugable words may have the stem and the inflectional suffix separated by a dot (・). For example, the adjective 赤い (akai, red) may be written as あか・い (aka·i) to separate the static prefix from the dynamic suffix.
English: Aeron Buchanan's Japanese Verb Chart: a concise summary of Japanese verb conjugation, handily formatted to fit onto one sheet of A4. Also includes irregulars, adjectives and confusing verbs. Also includes irregulars, adjectives and confusing verbs.