Hacker News Reader

Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

This is true of every language.

I took 4+ years of Japanese and was once nearly fluent; I never came across an equivalent there; the closest I can think of is an emphasis rule, which is not at all what's going on in English. Spanish (several years) seems very loose compared to english, but I agree it shows up there in a way that I never quite nailed (e.g., "el frio hielo").

I am curious if you can point to some article about this being a universal.

I didn't mean the stress issue (stress in Japanese is a completely different matter anyway) but the general principle of complex-to-write-down "rules" that are not taught explicitly to native speakers but which people automatically adopt.

Classifiers are a common example; words are often taught with classifiers (in most IE languages, gender) but you pick up words in reading or speech and automatically absorb the appropriate classifier even if not used, from other syntactic agreements. Japanese of course has a richer set than gender.

In another case: German, how you compose compound words (and far more interesting to me, how you read unfamiliar ones at a glance rather than parsing them as a student would) uses rules that just "feel obvious" after a while.

You a fast learner. It usually takes me several years of daily, primary use of a language before these kinds of things are intuitive.

The basic order seems similar in Japanese as well though, although it's a lot more loose. A big red ball would default to ookina akai booru. Akakute ookii booru isn't wrong, but it shifts the emphasis to "red" over "big".

Then again, Japanese adjectives don't behave very much English adjectives, keiyoushi (-i) conjugate much like verbs while keiyoudoushi (-na) are basically nouns with syntactic glue tacked on.

FYI 大きい (ookii) is an い adjective, not a な, so 大きな赤いボール is incorrect. I suspect you know this though since you got it right for the second example, but what you wanted is 大きくて赤いボール (ookikute akai booru) I believe. And additionally, for な "adjectives" (so to speak, since it's not a direct analog and have characteristics of nouns), you wouldn't just string な with the next adjective, but replace it with で. like, 静かで可愛い人。

But as you mentioned, as far as I understand, the ordering is much more about emphasis than some set rule - to put it with some contrived conversations:

A: I saw a big blue ball B: Eh? It was a big RED ball!

A: I saw a big red ball B: Eh? It was a SMALL red ball!

then either ordering could sound natural in context. But I'm not Japanese so I can ask my wife later if that's really the case.

Please do ask your wife: 大きな is a variant of 大きい and the correct form to use here.

https://ja.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%8A%E3%81%8A%E3%81%8D%E...

Basically, there is a short list of common adjectives including ookii and chiisai that have special 連体詞 forms ending in -na.

I didn't know that! But it also seems like all the descriptions on the web about 大きな refer to it as predominantly corresponding to abstract concepts, not physical items like a ball; and connecting multiple adjectives still typically doesn't attach the な.

Sanskrit has free word order. For example, "krishnam naro'shvam prashyati sundaram" -- the man sees the beautiful black horse. Here Krishnam == black, sundaram == beautiful. naro'sham is the combined form (sandhi) of narah (man) + ashvam (horse) and prashyati == sees.

Though Indian languages derived from Sanskrit have simpler rules and the adjectives are roughly in the same order as English (but the endings have to match the noun).

I believe Latin has the same property as well, however I’d assume when spoken within communities, both had preferred offerings. As in, folks weren’t arbitrarily ordering their words. But it does create really expressive options for prose and poetry.

Yes Latin and Greek both have this property though in practice it has some de facto conventions, as discussed.

I always felt Marathi was more “French” than “English”

I don't know what you mean.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com