Japanese adjectives

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

There are three types of word that can be considered to be adjectives in Japanese:

adjectives (Japanese: 形容詞, keiyōshi), or i-adjectives, which have a conjugating ending i which can become, for example, past or negative. For example, atsui "to be hot":

atsui hi "a hot day".
adjectival nouns (形容動詞, keiyō-dōshi, "adjectival verb"), or na-adjectives, which are followed by a form of the copula. For example, hen na "to be strange":

hen na hito "a strange person".
rentaishi (連体詞, rentaishi, "attributives"), sometimes called "true adjectives", which derive from adjectives, such as onaji "the same"

onaji hi "the same day".

Both keiyōshi and keiyōdōshi may predicate sentences, and both inflect, having both past and negative forms. Thus, for some scholars, these words are not adjectives, but are a type of verb. However, they do not show the full range of conjugation found in "regular" verbs. I-adjectives are inflected by dropping the "i" from the end and replacing it with the appropriate ending. Na-adjectives are inflected by dropping the "na" and replacing it with the appropriate form of the verb da, meaning "be".

	present	past	present neg.	past neg.
i adjective	atsui	atsukatta	atsukunai	atsukunakatta
na adjective	hen da	hen datta	hen janai/dewanai	hen dewanakatta

There are regular ways to turn the both keiyōdōshi and keiyōshi into adverbs (see below). The rentaishi are few in number, and unlike the other words, are strictly limited to modifying nouns. Rentaishi never predicate sentences. Examples include ookina 大きな "big" and onaji 同じ "same" (although there is also a noun, 同じ onaji, that can be used before the copula da/desu, as in 同じだ onaji da "It is the same").

1 Predicate forms
2 Adverb forms
3 Polite forms
4 Terminology
5 External links

[edit] Predicate forms

Both keiyōshi and keiyōdōshi may predicate sentences. For example,

Gohan ga atsui. "The rice is hot."

Kare wa hen da. "He's strange."

[edit] Adverb forms

Both keiyōdōshi and keiyōshi form adverbs, by following with ni in the case of keiyōdōshi:

hen ni naru "become strange",

and by changing i to ku in the case of keiyōshi:

atsuku naru "become hot".

[edit] Polite forms

Both keiyōshi and keiyōdōshi are made more polite by the use of desu, but the way that desu is used is different. Desu is added directly after keiyōshi and has no grammatical function; its only purpose is to make the utterance more polite (see Japanese honorifics). For keiyōdōshi, desu is used instead of da.

	plain	polite	polite past	neg. polite	neg. polite past
keiyōshi	atsui	atsui desu	atsukatta desu	atsukunai desu	atsukunakatta desu
keiyōdōshi	hen da	hen desu	hen deshita	hen dewa arimasen	hen dewa arimasendeshita

[edit] Terminology

This page	Japanese (kanji)	Japanese (rōmaji)	Other names
i adjectives	形容詞	keiyōshi	stative verbs, adjectival verbs, adjectives, i-adjectives
na adjectives	形容動詞	keiyōdōshi	copular nouns, adjectival nouns, quasi-adjectives, na-adjectives
	連体詞	rentaishi	true adjectives, prenominals, pre-noun adjectivals.

The Japanese word keiyōshi is used to denote an English adjective.

It is worth noting that because the widespread study of Japanese is still relatively new in the Western world, there are no generally accepted English translations for the above parts of speech, with varying texts adopting different sets, and others extant not listed above.