So I was studying some (vague, out of context) sentences, when i saw this

21. 先生は教えないの。

32. 先生が教えないの。

I automatically translated them as (My thought process is in brackets)

21. Won't you tell me about teacher? [This is one of the many translations, depending on the context. Others are "The teacher will not teach?" or "Won't you inform the teacher?" or "Won't you inform the teacher (and not any other)" and many more]

32. The teacher will not teach/inform? [I believe this will be its only translation, under any context]

IF (that's a pretty big if) these are even a little bit correct, I think I am finally becoming able to see the difference between　は and が.I knew the following things from Day 1, but I don't know why, they suddenly seem to make (a little bit) sense. Its pretty weird.

Basic Function :-
So GA is REALLY a subject marker, i.e. its is really connects the Subject to the Verb, like a string. The Verb is done by the Subject marked with GA. So , Enpitsu ga aru. The verb "aru" (to exist) is done by "Enpitsu" . It does help in reducing vagueness in sentences in comparison with は. If I go this way, In potential form too, (I think), 重い荷物が持てる。does not mean that I CAN hold heavy luggage. It means, the heavy luggage has the ability to be carried by (topic). (a guess, Please correct me if I am wrong.)

While WA, is, just like its name, a topic. A topic is a bit vague, so the Verb/Adjective/Sentence is done AROUND the topic, like floating around it. Like in this adjective...

犬が好きです。This means that dog is in the "state of being" (which is embedded) of being desirable. The topic wa would decide who it is desirable to.
犬は好きです。Here "something" is desirable. And its "floating around" the "concept of dog". Now it could be that Dog is desirable. Or something is desirable to dog.

Emphasis:- It follows that GA will put emphasis on what comes before it, because it is connected to the sentence after it. If you see the sentence, you WILL see the subject.

Contrasting Features :- This is a bit iffy, but

So if the "sentence" is "floating" around a "topic" it will give others the impression that the "sentence" thinks that other "topics" are not pretty. "Sentence" even fails to acknowledge their existence (I don't know about other topics, but this topic is ....) or something like that.

Please, Please correct me if I am wrong (I am counting on it )

manman2a Wrote:So I was studying some (vague, out of context) sentences, when i saw this

21. 先生は教えないの。

32. 先生が教えないの。

I automatically translated them as (My thought process is in brackets)

21. Won't you tell me about teacher? [This is one of the many translations, depending on the context. Others are "The teacher will not teach?" or "Won't you inform the teacher?" or "Won't you inform the teacher (and not any other)" and many more]

32. The teacher will not teach/inform? [I believe this will be its only translation, under any context]

More or less. I don't think all of your possibilities for 21 are valid, but it does have more than one potential explanation. This is usually defined as "topic-comment" -- the Xは phrase means you are identifying X (which is always some known information) and then you're going to make a comment about it. The comment doesn't have to have any specific grammatical relationship to X.

Quote:So GA is REALLY a subject marker, i.e. its is really connects the Subject to the Verb, like a string. The Verb is done by the Subject marked with GA. So , Enpitsu ga aru. The verb "aru" (to exist) is done by "Enpitsu" . It does help in reducing vagueness in sentences in comparison with は. If I go this way, In potential form too, (I think), 重い荷物が持てる。does not mean that I CAN hold heavy luggage. It means, the heavy luggage has the ability to be carried by (topic). (a guess, Please correct me if I am wrong.)

がpotential is dealt with differently depending on the book you look at. I'm personally not fond of the passive explanation although it's a popular one (it strikes me as an explanation that tries to force が into the English grammatical concept of a "subject".)

My explanation (derived from the JSL textbook) is that when you're dealing with things that are direct objects in English, を is used with things you can control, and が with things you can't. (Volition vs. non-volition). Thus, you say 重い荷物が持てる because you can't directly control whether or not you are able to pick up the luggage.

I agree that it is important not to force Western grammar ideas on Japanese. Native Japanese ideas of grammar are actually somewhat different from what Western textbooks teach. And of course all theoretical grammar (even in the same language) is a speculative science, attempting to analyze and categorize something that existed before there were any grammarians.

I'd very much like to read more native Japanese grammar theory when I get good enough to handle that properly. Not so much for learning the language but for understanding different ways of thinking about language itself. And I am a firm believer that, as far as possible the best way of learning language is doing other things through the medium of that language rather than "practicing" it as an end in itself.

One point that interests me is that passive sentences do have a tendency to make the object of an action closer to being the actor.

For example:

Mary threw the ball

is differentiated from

The ball threw Mary

Purely by word order. But there is no ambiguity even though the second sentence is absurd.

If we phrase it passively:

The ball was thrown by Mary

The ball has moved into Mary's old position at the front of the sentence. The subject position.

In Japanese

Mary ga booru wo nageta.

Mary is marked by ga as the subject or doer.

And similarly, in a passive sentence the ball gets the subject marker ga.

To say that in both cases the ball becomes the "doer" is possibly taking things too far (grammar being in any case an interpretative science). But it certainly seems to move in that direction.

CureDolly Wrote:I agree that it is important not to force Western grammar ideas on Japanese.

I agree, but I'm a bit bored on this sunny Saturday afternoon so let me give it a try (inspired by "Kennedy's Revised Latin Primer"):

1. Declension of Nouns:

Nominative hon the book
Genitive hon no of the book
Dative hon ni to/for the book
Accusative hon o the book
Ablative hon kara from the book
Vocative hon! O book!

2. Conjugation of Verbs:

Present: watasi wa kaku I read
Perfect: watashi wa kaita koto ga aru I have read
Pluperfect: watashi wa kaita koto ga atta I had read

etc. Just joking of course.

Actually I would say that this is a valid observation, and I have long noted that the function of Japanese particles is very much analogous to that of cases in some Western languages (English used to have them too, and it still retains a kind of genitive case formed by 's which, interestingly works rather like a particle!)

I met a Japanese lady learning German who told me she found German much easier to understand than English because sentences were "the right way around" (verbs at the end) and the cases were so functionally similar to Japanese particles.

Grammar may not repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes!

Quote:Nominative hon ga the book
...
Vocative hon yo! O book!

FTFY. If you're gonna shoehorn Japanese into an Indo-European case system, you gotta do it all the way

Edit: In case someone is confused by the yo - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_particles#yo.

I love that yo! Discovered it a while back. And yes, the vocative immediately comes to mind.

I don't think one should shoehorn Japanese into Indo-European grammar. But the parallels are certainly there.

This would really take things too far afield but I tend toward Chomsky-sensei's theory that we have "universal grammar" hard-wired from before we can speak, and what we do is map the local dialect (native language) to that.

This doesn't at all boil down to "Japanese has cases". It is more that academic grammar is a set of artificial conventions that attempt to explain the way particular languages work.

No theoretical grammar is the *basis* of the living grammar anyone uses in any language. It is just a way of trying to describe it.

In Japanese I really want to understand the way Japanese gammarians describe it. This is rather different from the way English texts, even the most respectable, present Japanese to English speakers.

Neither of them will be perfect because all are *post factum* attempts at description of an existing phenomenon that goes deeper than its descriptors. But the Japanese description is likely to get closer to the heart of Japanese.

On the other hand, for learners, any model that increases understanding is a good thing in my view.

(Given that all models are only descriptive. The important thing is not to get too hidebound and literalistic about any of them.)

Unfortunately most Japanese grammar (in Japanese) is also weighed down by a combination of classification borrowed from English, and the old grammatical categories inherited from the Edo-period linguists that are connected too strongly to the kana writing system.

Ah. Thank you for that information. A future fascination fades somewhat.

But the world is so full of wonderful things, isn't it?

It's not only Chomsky who thought there was some kind of underlying "general" grammar.
As a matter of fact, he was far from the first one.
We can actually see a first hint of the idea in the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel.
Apart from that: every biologist must have had from time to time the idea that given the genetical similitude of human beings, there could also be a genetical similitude in language systems.

However, when I started off on Japanese, a year ago, my idea was to "forget" everything I knew about language, to tackle it completely fresh and without any preformed ideas based on the languages I already knew (French, English and a bit of German).
So, I don't feel much for comparing the particle system with Latin grammar or anything else, although I sometimes use it when talking to layman for the sake of clearity, although in that way I'm actually obscuring reality.

yudantaiteki Wrote:Unfortunately most Japanese grammar (in Japanese) is also weighed down by a combination of classification borrowed from English, and the old grammatical categories inherited from the Edo-period linguists that are connected too strongly to the kana writing system.

Fact is that the whole Japanese writing system is based on ideas Japanese linguists had about Japanese grammar, which is clearly shown by the functional differences in kanji/kana.
Which means we can't do without the old grammatical categories inherited from the Edo-period linguists.

PMotte Wrote:It's not only Chomsky who thought there was some kind of underlying "general" grammar.
As a matter of fact, he was far from the first one.

Sou desu ne. My actual perspective is more Platonic than Chomskian (and I am only using Plato as a well-known Western representative of the perspective), but I didn't want to get us that far off topic!

I agree. I too look at Japanese grammar as a thing in itself. I find parallels with cases etc. interesting from a philosophical point of view, but not especially useful, beyond early explanations, where, say, if someone is familiar with cases, they can help to clarify.

I suppose the problem with even this is the tendency of people to cling to "explanations" and take them too literally. I think one should be able to examine the concept, take what is useful from it, and then (from the perspective of Japanese usage) throw it away. It is more a mnemonic than a "fact".

It may have (I think it has) philosophical implications. But it has no implications for our actual use of Japanese and what we should be doing is immersing ourselves and treating Japanese as Japanese, not trying to "translate" it into anything else.

All translations are approximations.

So yes. I agree with you absolutely about "forgetting" other systems from the practical perspective. It may seem odd but I think it can actually be useful to hold the two ideas simultaneously.

But this is partly predicated on having a "Japanese inner life".

So in this case, comparing particles to cases is something I do in English about Japanese. But not something I do in Japanese.

One doesn't learn Japanese through English. One learns Japanese through Japanese. One only learns about Japanese through English. That can be a useful preparation/support for learning the language. And sometimes it can be a roadblock, especially if one becomes too attached to it.

One learns a language by using it, absorbing it, thinking in it (and not translating it in one's head). Everything else is just scaffolding to support that. Like all scaffolding it should not be permanent.

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PMotte Wrote:

yudantaiteki Wrote:Unfortunately most Japanese grammar (in Japanese) is also weighed down by a combination of classification borrowed from English, and the old grammatical categories inherited from the Edo-period linguists that are connected too strongly to the kana writing system.

Fact is that the whole Japanese writing system is based on ideas Japanese linguists had about Japanese grammar, which is clearly shown by the functional differences in kanji/kana.
Which means we can't do without the old grammatical categories inherited from the Edo-period linguists.

I don't know what you're trying to say. The writing system for Japanese was developed long before anyone was studying grammar or linguistics. The Edo-period kokugakusha were limited in their grammatical analysis because they were unable to separate the writing system from the language.

I can't believe they didn't have any grammatical insight.
Look at the way they gave kana and kanji different functions.
They must have had some insight in grammar.
Grammar studies are much older then the Japanese writing system.
As a matter of fact, Japan had invited scholars from China to learn more of the Chinese writing system, which means the system was introduced very conciously.
And there is a difference between insight being hampered and having no insight.

PMotte Wrote:I can't believe they didn't have any grammatical insight.
Look at the way they gave kana and kanji different functions.

This has nothing to do with grammar, and it was also done long before the Edo period. The different functions of kanji and kana were already in place by the Heian period.

I didn't say they didn't have *any* grammatical insight, just that their grammatical knowledge was sometimes limited by their dependence on writing Japanese with kana.

manman2a Wrote:犬が好きです。This means that dog is in the "state of being" (which is embedded) of being desirable. The topic wa would decide who it is desirable to.

Who likes what doesn't have to do with topicalization. Both the subject and the object for 好き are supposed to be marked with が and both can be marked with は when it's topicalized. If you turn 私は犬が好きだ into a conditional clause, it becomes 私が犬が好きなら.

Quote:If I go this way, In potential form too, (I think), 重い荷物が持てる。does not mean that I CAN hold heavy luggage. It means, the heavy luggage has the ability to be carried by (topic). (a guess, Please correct me if I am wrong.)

重い荷物が持てる is a lot closer to "I can hold ..." than "the heavy luggage has the ability to be carried". Actually, the latter is unnatural for the sense of Japanese language. In Japanese, inanimate objects basically can't be the subject of potential verbs. For example, "This tree can grow big" translates to この木は大きくなる or …なりえる, not なれる.