I was going through my practice exercises…..when this example came up:
きれいなお土産を買いました。(Kirei Na O Miyage O Kai Mashi Ta)
The English translation said:
“I bought a pretty souvenir”
I had a thought:
As a novice Japanese language learner (currently at Chapter 3 of the Genki I textbook), how does the Japanese language deal with Singularity and Plurality (especially in this case).
Also, since “tachi” and “ra” only applies to people or animate objects, what can we use for say inanimate things?
Can we put like 多い 【おおい】(ooi) OR 沢山 【たくさん】(takusan) somewhere there to indicate that I didn’t just buy one souvenir but rather that I bought more than one souvenir.
P.S.
Did some digging and a similar question was posted many years ago by a Reddit user named u/evandamastah on the /r/Linguistics / Reddit Linguistics board.
This was the question:
“In languages that lack morphological markers for things like plural, definiteness, etc., are they still distinguished in speakers’ minds?
This might be a little bit of a sapir-whorf debate, but my question is essentially pretty simple, I think. It came to mind when thinking about Japanese the other night – in Japanese, 猫 /neko/ alone can mean ‘cat’ in any of the following forms: the cat, a cat, cats, the cats, some cats. However, although that distinction is not common in most nouns, it is present in some pronouns and nouns, such as 彼 /kare/ vs 彼ら /karera/, or 私 /watasi/ and 私たち /watasitati/.
My question is although this distinction is not morphologically marked in normal nouns, does it still exist in the speakers minds? I’m not even sure if this would matter, and I am not sure how one might test for it. But when a Japanese speaker sees three cats and says 猫, does he assign plurality to that word even though it may be unmarked?”
Also:
If there are any Linguists, Polyglots or Native Japanese here , please feel free to chime in as well =)
12 comments
In Japanese, the noun can mean either singular or plural. You can clarify by adding words that indicate the number.
本を買いました。-> 本を一冊買いました。
本を買いました。-> 本をたくさん買いました。/ 多くの本を買いました。/ 本を100冊買いました。
You can use たち for most nouns, but it’s not necessary.
5冊の本を買いました。/ 5冊の本たちを買いました。
この家の犬はかわいいです。/ この家の犬たちはかわいいです。
you can, but unless it’s extremely important to clarify that it’s a lot of something, just let go of the need to pluralize things or give a specific number of them
also tachi and ra are not really plural, they’re closer to “et al”, and can be used with people’s names, like takashi-san-tachi doesn’t mean a bunch of takashi-sans, it means takashi and his group
>My question is although this distinction is not morphologically marked in normal nouns, does it still exist in the speakers minds?
In English, we mark nouns the same whether there are 2 of them or an uncountable infinity… but we can clearly conceive of any and all of those distinct amounts, right?
Think of the word “sheep”—which does not change based on singular or plural—has that ambiguity ever caused an issue for you? You can say “many sheep”, “one sheep”, “a few sheep” that all give you a good idea of how many we’re talking about that don’t rely on a plural marking on the noun itself.
in Japanese, conversation is contextual
so one off questions like this is perfectly valid but remember that you need to pay attention to the feel of conversations
like for instance, you can say this and if it makes sense that in this situation you have many friends… it can be followed up in a sentence fragment response just like in English. like use a number counter ‘san mai’ if the gift was like a card or something. there is countless quickie responses to add on to that original sentence or hold up 3 fingers and say ‘san’
my 2 cents, i purposefully try to this language like how i would normally speak over trying too hard
Plurality in Japanese is usually left out unless it really matters. You can use たくさん or 少し or something else to elude to a general quantity, or use specific numbers or other strategies:
大阪でお土産をたくさん買いました。I bought many souvenirs in Osaka.
神戸でお土産をあまり買いませんでした。I didn’t really buy souvenirs in Kobe (meaning, you bought maybe one or two, if that).
京都でお土産を一つ買いました。I bought one souvenir in Kyoto.
奈良ではトムさんとジュディさんのお土産を買いました。I bought Tom and Judy’s souvenirs in Nara.
Think of it this way:
English lacks context within the plural. “Cats” could mean 2 cats, 20 cats, or 200 cats. How many times in your life can you legitimately point to this causing a major misunderstanding or break in the flow of conversation?
What tends to happen is that the speaker’s brain instinctively recognizes when further context of a number is needed and offers it ahead of time. “Do you have any cash on you?” “Yes, I have *twenty* dollars.” Your brain already knows that “Yes, I have dollars” is not a useful enough answer even if it’s grammatically correct.
Once you start speaking Japanese regularly, you come to realize that the difference between singular and plural is similarly useless. It seems like it would be terribly important given English makes such a big deal out of it, but you quickly realize there are almost no cases where it leads to actual confusion.
Just say how many
It’s more or less as you said. Japanese does not have grammatical plurals, at least in the sense of those that exist in languages like English. There are numerous ways to clarify amounts when needed of which examples have been given on this thread (たち/ら, 多く, たくさん, etc), but at the end of the day, context is the main determinant of whether any given noun is to be singular or plural.
This is one of the reasons why I, who has a linguistic background, wanted to learn Japanese –to discover which linguistic features that Indo-European speakers take for granted are actually not as universal as we think.
Number is one of those. It seems very weird to us that the number of an entity being discussed doesn’t matter. But consider that some languages, like Slovenian or ancient Greek, have a dual in addition to a singular and a plural. It’s actually very handy to have a specific grammatical way of referring to a pair of something, as many things come in twos. But the absence of the dual form doesn’t bother us at all.
Also consider that Japanese has many nuances that are unfamiliar to us. For example, they have two separate words for “give”: one is used when it’s from the speaker(‘s in group) to the listener(‘s in group), 上げる (あげる), and the other is used when it’s the other way around (くれる). For another example, Japanese has separate words for an outer corner (like the corner of a house), 角 (かど) and an inner corner (like the corner of a room), 隅 (すみ). (English actually has separate words for the second thing as well, “nook” or “recess,” but those are not used as much as “corner.”)
It would be interesting to ask Japanese people to draw “[noun]” where “noun” is a Japanese noun which would translate to a countable English noun, and which would be relatively easy to draw. For example, “line” or “circle” or “eye” or “face.” My bet would be that by default, most people would draw just one of the items, but for “eye,” they’d draw two, as two eyes is the “natural” number of the object. For things we commonly encounter in multiples, like, say, matches or peanuts, I’d expect the test subjects to draw multiple ones.
I was reading an essay the other day that was basically “intro to literary analysis 101 for Japanese Junior High Schoolers” and it was talking about the famous Basho haiku
古池や蛙飛びこむ水の音
The old pond
A frog leaps in
Sound of the water
It talked about the difficulty in translating this poem because the translator has to make a decision about the number of frogs, information not present in the original texts. The author then asked a bunch of Japanese people how many frogs they picture when they read the poem. Most said “one” because that’s what their teacher had told them when they were in school. The author then brought up that this is just one interpretation and that a famous poet (子規 Shiki, maybe?) Imagined there to be a whole bunch of frogs. It then goes off on there being multiple ways to interpret a piece of literature etc
But I think that little anecdote shows that people usually have an image in their mind of how many of something there are. Different people might have different images though. It’s all up for interpretation based on context
Just wanted to chime in and say I’m happy to see this question being asked. I was thinking about this earlier today while working through an exercise and it’s really helpful seeing others have to say about it.
English has a direct analog of how Japanese nouns work in the form of mass or non-count or uncountable nouns (three different words for the same concept). Examples are chocolate, milk, bread, data, cattle, and so on.
You can’t say a cattle or two cattles. Instead it requires a counter. One head of cattle, two head of cattle, etc. (Weirdly enough head doesn’t take an s when counting cattle, even though it usually would when counted.)
Similarly it’s weird to say “a bread” usually one would say “a slice of bread” or “a piece of bread” or “a loaf of bread”.
However when we don’t need to specify we just drop the number completely for mass nouns.
E.g. “I baked bread last weekend.” (How many loaves? Who knows.)
Did you assign number or plurality to it in your head? I don’t think I do.