What does な (na) mean in this context?

I’m a huge Yoasobi fan, so I decided I’m going to use their songs to help me with my Japanese learning. I’ve started with “If I Could Draw Life”, and the first line is “月が綺麗な夜に (tsuki が kerei na yoru ni)”. I understand that 月 (tsuki) is moon, が (ga), な (na), and に (ni) are particles, 綺麗 (kirei) is pretty, and 夜 (yoru) is night. This is basically giving us our setting, “During a night when the moon is pretty or beautiful”.

This is great, because I understand the context, right? Well, not fully. You see, as far as I understand it, な (na) is a particle similar to ね (ne) except just a bit rougher, and it can also be used as kind of a precursor to a negative verb, such as ない (nai) or じゃない (janai). The thing is, when I remove な from the first line, it becomes “月が綺麗夜に” which translates to the same thing.

My question is, how does な contribute to this line? I’ve tried looking up definitions for the particle, but I never find this specific scenario. Am I just not searching right?

5 comments
  1. な isn’t a particle, it’s part of 綺麗. 綺麗 in this case is being used attributively (preceding the noun), and as it’s a な-adjective, you need that な on the end.

    Are you aware of い and な-adjectives and how they function? I don’t mean this in a rude way, it’s just that this is usually one of the things you learn at the very beginning of studying Japanese

  2. な isn’t a particle, but rather the 連体形(れんたいけい) conjugation of the 形容動詞(けいようどうし) (な-adjective) 綺麗(きれい)だ.

    な allows the 形容動詞 「綺麗」 to connect with another noun.

    [noun]は**綺麗だ**。[noun] is pretty/clean.

    **綺麗な**[noun]だ。It is a pretty/clean [noun].

    Edit: If you remove な, the sentence becomes ungrammatical. The translation becomes something more like, “the moon in the cleanliness evening” or “the moon in the beauty evening.” Apart from fixed Sino-Japanese compound words (like 自由民主党◎ and not 自由**な**民主党✖, or 株式会社◎ and not 株式**の**会社✖), IIRC nouns can only modify other nouns using [の or な](https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/na-adjectives-no-adjectives/).

  3. It’s a na adjective, there are also i adjectives, I think you can look at the inflections on Jisho.org

  4. If you’d use a textbook, you’d learn what な adjectives are so much earlier than you’d be able to input that text that the question never would have come up in the first place.

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