Simple question: Do you think particles are words?

I don't think so. I'd like to know what you all think.

"The" is a word even though it doesn't mean anything. There are a lot of words that don't mean anything. Meaning something is not a prerequisite for being a word.

I don't know why I think particles are not words...I just don't think they are.

Does anyone know what Japanese people think of this question?

They are disambiguatting suffixes but I see no reason why not to think of them as words. You can ascribe meaning to them like any other word. They're hard to define because we don't always have equivalents in English (because such disambiguation isn't as necessary due to fixed word order). Here are some attempts at one to one definitions though:
は: ',', regarding, as for, in (as in: in winter)
が: do, is
を: to (this one is hard)
に: to, by
の: 's, of
'The' does have meaning by the way.

I guess it depends on which particles you are talking about.

が probably couldn't be considered a "word" since it basically marks the subject.

例：あれができます。[i] can do that over there.

but よ and ね　which are particles (I think? the ones on the end of sentences, like 食べたよ。）SHOULD be considered words since they have meaning and act like a word does.

よ　means something like "i inform you" while ね can mean something like "right?" or "don't you think so?" or "didn't I"

例:
食べたよ　[i] ate [it], I inform you.
食べたね？[i] ate [it], right?
たべたねぇ。[i] ate [alot、good], didn't I.

Obviously it's a matter of definition. So I think your simple question is asking a little complicated things: What is your definition of "word"? Does it include particles? What is native speakers' intuitive definition like?

Without a clear, scientific definition, I can't say if I think of particles as words. But an even more complicated issue is that what your teacher teaches you as a single word may be considered a combination of a word and particle in linguistics. For example, you might think 行って is a verb in te-form. But the te-form thing doesn't even exist in linguistics. Japanese grammar doesn't have such a thing. It's a notion made up to hide complicated things from foreigners, i.e., it's a term which only appears in textbooks for foreigners. In standard grammar, it's considered a combination of verb 行く and particle て (The pronunciation of 行くて is then changed to 行って by another rule you don't learn.). If you look in a J-J dictionary for native speakers, you'll find many "meanings" of this particle. As you can see from this example, you also have to define what a particle is.

"Words are thought of as the smallest meaningful unit of speech that can stand by themselves."

So I would say no.

zachandhobbes Wrote:"Words are thought of as the smallest meaningful unit of speech that can stand by themselves."

So I would say no.

Then you have to deal with a lost-in-translation problem. Usually "word" in this thread's context is translated as 単語. But if you look up 単語 in 大辞泉 (a J-J dictionary), you'll find that 鳥が鳴く consists of three "単語s," namely 鳥, が, and 鳴く. Another J-J dictionary's example says 雪が降る has three 単語s, i.e., 雪, が, and 降る.

So technically the particle が is counted as 単語 but not a word by your definition.

Well, there are translational things but couldn't those just be called compound words?

cupcake, etc.

Maybe it's not right to use the english definition of word. but a good way to do it would be to isolate the word-in-question and see if it has any meaning.

particles don't.

I don't know I'm not claiming to be a japanese or english grammar major. I just got the definition from wikipedia.

zachandhobbes Wrote:"Words are thought of as the smallest meaningful unit of speech that can stand by themselves."

So I would say no.

I think that is an interesting definition, but how many words do you know that actually exist in isolation, i.e., stand by themselves? We can't say something like "dog" stands by itself because for the very notion of "dog" to exist we need the entire world to be there. Nothing lives in a vacumn, not even words. We need other words like "animal," "pet," and "friend" to make sense of the word "dog."

So just because particles might need another words or sentence to make it make sense (or to let the particle make the other words and grammar make sense) we can't say they aren't words can we?

But honestly, does this discussion matter? What are the consequences of us calling particles words or not calling them words?

zachandhobbes Wrote:Well, there are translational things but couldn't those just be called compound words?

cupcake, etc.

Maybe it's not right to use the english definition of word. but a good way to do it would be to isolate the word-in-question and see if it has any meaning.

particles don't.

I don't know I'm not claiming to be a japanese or english grammar major. I just got the definition from wikipedia.

Hmm? が is a 単語 on its own, and native speakers won't think 雪が or が降る is one 単語. We feel they have two components. And I think 単語 is the closest notion to "word."

I mean, lost-in-translation is already happening in this definition: "Words are thought of as the smallest meaningful unit of speech that can stand by themselves." This works very well for some languages like English. But it doesn't for other languages like Japanese.

It's difficult for me to go against a native

Actually, I think I'm going back on what I said.

We think of "to" as a word. However, I doubt anyone here could come up with a great definition for the word 'to'. It's a very hard word to describe...

So I think that particles are words.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/to

Even dictionaries don't have flat definitions, but explanations for when to use them.

So I think "が" and "に" and things like that are like "to" and "at" in English.

A thread with a title like this can only end up being a meaningless discussion on semantics.

Lidsay Lohan: Are her boobs real? I say yes. They have a very natural droop to them.

Discuss

particles are words, because when you hear them they immediately implie meaning. Imagine you hear the word 先生 and then が you immediately understand oh! Teacher does or is something. That's why I gave the suggested definition do/is in my other post which I'll paste again here:

は: ',', regarding, as for, in (as in: in winter)
が: do, is
を: to (this one is hard)
に: to, by
の: 's, of

放課後はトムくんが本を読む。
after school, Tom do book to read.
トムはブスで学校に行く。
Tom, bus by school to go.

and so on. I think the only particle which is hard to define is を because we don't have a word that implies being acted upon by some action. Maybe you could say define it as 'be' as in 'be' verb past participle.
Examples:
トムがリンゴを食べる。
Tom do apple be eat
図書館で本を読む。
library at book be read
先生が私たちに日本語を教える。
teacher do us to japanese be teach

and so on.

*edited, because I spelled 'hear' as 'here' twice. Been in Japan too long...

jcdietz03 Wrote:"The" is a word even though it doesn't mean anything. There are a lot of words that don't mean anything. Meaning something is not a prerequisite for being a word.

I take offense to this statement. The word "the" has plenty of meaning. An article often used to mark a specific object. And it means other things too I'm sure.

Edit:

hereticalrants Wrote:A thread with a title like this can only end up being a meaningless discussion on semantics.

I agree with this too. XD

Connectors, markers, directors. Thinking of them as words will damage your health. example: と doesn't mean ”and” it's just "connects nouns telling you they are part of a list." Native speakers don't really think of them either way I guess. と just adds meaning to the nouns it connects with. That's probably it really. I highly suspect that initially as a second language learner you learn things in great detail and then they become just things you use without thinking. When was the last time you stopped to think about a, an, the, of, for, it, in, on, at...

Perhaps that's when you know your a native speaker, when you stop thinking about right or wrong or how something "should" be said and language just becomes something that "exists"

kazelee Wrote:Lidsay Lohan: Are her boobs real? I say yes. They have a very natural droop to them.

Discuss

LMFAO

I was under the impression that many of these particles get "attached" to the previous words, much like "-ly" "-ing" etc. I'd never consider these words either, just grammatical endings.

I don't see much point in this discussion of semantics either, other than people arguing over how to classify them rather than working on learning the actual language :p

As people have said, the question first requires a definition of "word" and then it can be answered; a better question might be what the difference is if it is or is not a word.

Late response, but I know the answer to this.

In linguistics, a particle is a function word that that doesn't fall into any of the major word classes. An example of an English particle is to.

Function words are words that have little meaning on their own and mainly serve to indicate grammatical function. To is also an example of this.

By this definition, yes, particles are words.

cntrational Wrote:Late response, but I know the answer to this.

In linguistics, a particle is a function word that that doesn't fall into any of the major word classes. An example of an English particle is to.

Function words are words that have little meaning on their own and mainly serve to indicate grammatical function. To is also an example of this.

By this definition, yes, particles are words.

Recently I read a somewhat relevant discussion on the talk page for the Wikipedia article on polysynthetic languages. One user thought that the whole concept was completely arbitrary, since the example word from the Chukchi language, Təmeyŋəlevtpəγtərkən ("I have a fierce headache"), was "basically a sentence with no spaces". Another user pointed out that the first user was confusing orthographic words (those that are separated with spaces according to spelling conventions) with linguistic words (minimal potentially-free linguistic units) and that there were various criteria and tests that can be used to determine which morphemes are words and which are parts of other words. A third user elaborated by giving a few examples of such tests, like the WH-substitution test:

Wilhelm kicked the carrot
who kicked the carrot
Wilhelm kicked what
Wilhelm did what to the carrot
Wilhelm what ed the carrot
Wilhelm kick what the carrot

The last two sentences are grammatically unsound, so in this sentence the morphemes "kick" and "ed" form a single word. Also note that there is no acceptable substitute for "the", meaning that it also isn't a linguistic word, but only a clitic (BTW, the linked article also mentions Japanese particles). There are other kinds of tests mentioned in the discussion.

Function words like "to" in your example are always orthographic words and not linguistic words. The concept of orthographic words does not apply to Japanese, since there are no spaces, and it only gets introduced into the language in the process of romanization. I suppose that the idea to write particles separately is an orthographic calque from European languages. As for the tests, it seems to me that particles like は,が,の and に fail them, so they cannot be considered words in the pure linguistic sense.

Quote:The concept of orthographic words does not apply to Japanese, since there are no spaces, and it only gets introduced into the language in the process of romanization.

That's not entirely true. There is a fairly large amount of non-romanized native Japanese material that has spaces -- this includes children's books and a good number of video games (mostly older ones).

I'm a bit skeptical that the idea that "to" is not a word. If it's not a word, what is it?

yudantaiteki Wrote:That's not entirely true. There is a fairly large amount of non-romanized native Japanese material that has spaces -- this includes children's books and a good number of video games (mostly older ones).

Yeah, I forgot about those, I was mostly thinking about "serious" literature. Isn't that a relatively recent phenomenon though? Are there any pre-Meiji texts that have spaces? Besides, in the children's texts I have seen (like those on this site) the particles were not written separately.

cntrational Wrote:I'm a bit skeptical that the idea that "to" is not a word. If it's not a word, what is it?

I was not suggesting that function words are "not real words" - the convention in English is that they are words and there is probably no need to change that. However, the concept of orthographic words is not very helpful in making meaningful comparisons between languages in terms of things like morpheme-to-word ratio, especially if the languages in question are very different. In those cases a more universal definition of "word" is necessary.

The idea that prepositions are not words seems counter-intuitive in English, but in some languages it sounds pretty plausible. For example, the Russian equivalents to "to", "with" and "in" are "k", "s" and "v" - as a kid I used to wonder "How can these be words, if they consist of exactly zero syllables?" Of course, I had no idea about clitics at the time. Also, the arbitrariness of orthographic boundaries is seen more clearly in languages that are grammatically similar to Japanese, but have an alphabetic writing system. For instance the phrase ジョンと一緒 can be translated into Kazakh as Джонмен бiрге, but the phrase ジョンとトム is written as Джон мен Том. I believe that the reason why the exact same morpheme is written without a space in one case and with one in the other is that the morpheme meaning "and" is written separately in Russian, which gave Kazakh its Cyrillic alphabet, even though there are languages that write it unseparated, like Arabic and Hebrew.