How should one order the nouns using the particle の?

この緑の車probably means something different. The この refers to 緑in this example , so I think it would mean something like the car of this green tone.

EDIT: Apparently I’m wrong about this

車 - car
「緑の車」 - green car
この - this X
この緑 - this green
この「緑の車」 - this green car
「この緑」の車 - the car of this green tone (brackets just for emphasis, I’m sure they aren’t used like this)

I don’t know for sure (this is just a guess), but I think it’s just a matter of putting the emphasis in different places. That’s how I interpret it anyway. I’ve never seen anything used before この though.

I’m deleting my last post because it was dumb and not helpful.

It’s wrong because the demonstrative adjective (この) would need to come before any other modifying adjectives

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So, is the right answer for “this green car” この緑の車?

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Yes.

I don’t know your learning style, but talking about demonstrative adjectives etc has never helped me. One thing that did, though, was internalizing the idea that long phrases in Japanese can be treated as essentially one ‘piece’ of language. In your case 緑の車 is like one ‘thing’ so when you add は you are referring to this-green-car like it’s one item.

It’s good to get this idea solid early on as it’ll help you later on when you can start adding actions etc to the noun and still keep it as one ‘thing’. For example:

けんいちたちもタカコもおばあちゃんの家に行った日。。。

Here 日 is the item being described by everything before it. A direct-ish translation is very odd in English, but would go something like “The Kenichi-and-others-and-Takako-went-to-the-old-lady’s-house-day”.

These can get super long in Japanese and wrapping my head round the idea was a big challenge when I first started encountering them in reading.

Our old commander-in-chief breadstickninja had a good post about this which I’ll link if I can find it…

Edit: Here it is - link

Well, with relative clauses, the positioning of a demonstrative matters. As explained in this paper (PDF) by Ishizuka (which somewhat contradicts what I read before about この always coming last), contrary to popular belief, Japanese does (partially) make a distinction between restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses if an overt demonstrative is present. That partial distinction is determined by the placement of the demonstrative. To take an example from the paper…

  1. その兄貴が買ってきたリンゴ - That apple that brother bought. [Restrictive]
  2. 兄貴が買ってきたそのリンゴ - That apple, which brother bought. [Non-restrictive]

It’s not quite so simple a divide: When a relative clause follows a demonstrative, it can only be interpreted as restrictive, but when a relative clause precedes a demonstrative, it can be either restrictive or non-restrictive. Which is to say, the translation for 1 would be a valid translation for 2, but the translation for 2 would not be a valid translation for 1. In fact, for 2, the determination of whether it’s restrictive or non-restrictive pretty much comes, like so much in Japanese, down to context. If there only is one apple, it’s probably non-restrictive, but if there are several and only one of them was bought by bro, then it could be restrictive.

From that, it’s easy to see what I guess was the reasoning behind what I previously read: No, a demonstrative doesn’t have to be the last thing before the noun, but it’s ‘safer’ to do so, because it can mean the same thing as putting the demonstrative before the relative clause, but not vice versa. To put a point on it, see what happens when we add ところで to the relative clause.

  1. そのところで兄貴が買ってきたリンゴ - [doesn’t make sense - a restriction cannot be “by the way”]
  2. ところで兄貴が買ってきたそのリンゴ - That apple, which, by the way, brother bought. [can only be interpreted as non-restrictive]

(Actually, I think 1 would be interpreted as “The apple, which brother bought at that place/at that time/in that state”, but that interpretation has その as part of the relative clause, not in front of it, which is what we’re looking at.)

But as this applies to relative clauses, I’m not so sure whether or not it applies to の-adjectives. If you happen to need a の-adjective in anything other than the nonpast-positive, it becomes a relative clause (using a conjugation of だ, e.g. 緑じゃない車 - a car that is not green), but when it is in the nonpast-positive, I get confused.

In any case, here’s an example I found of この coming after a の-adjective.

薄黄緑のこの花が、いつ頃から好まれていたのか不明ですが、安永六年(1780)の書物「都名所圖會(都名所図会)」には鬱金(うこん)の桜が京都の御室の仁和寺に植えてあると載せられています。[gloss mine]

“It is unknown when this pale chartreuse flower came to be preferred, but in the An’ei 6 (1780) book ‘A Collection of Pictures of the Capital’s Famous Places’, it is said that yellow cherries [or whatever Prunus serrulata var. lannesiana might be called in English] were planted in the Omuro sect’s Ninna Temple in Kyoto.”

So what’s going on here? Is it the same as for relative clauses: that 薄黄緑の is additional non-restrictive information, therefore not included within the scope of the demonstrative? Or is there some other reason?

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