Is 左 a na-adjective, but 右 isnt?

That’s what I meant with British vs American English. I guess that’s not really the case with 同じ.

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Yes, if you took this to mean that some regions use な and some don’t… no, I don’t think there’s any particular regional variation, but I’m not an expert on regional Japanese. I just don’t know of any where such a variation exists. Basically, don’t use な with 同じ unless it’s a case where it’s a different kind of な like in 同じなので.

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So it’s the kind of adjectival noun, that rarely acts as an adjective.

You can use it like an adjective, and it’s quite normal for it to be an adjective. Just don’t use な even though it’s a 形容動詞. It’s an exception.

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It uses じ instead?

No… じ is just part of the word itself. It’s not おな with a じ particle. It’s a remnant of when it was a different part of speech in an older form of Japanese.

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It’s more like that, but it can’t be inflected in modern Japanese.

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I was alluding to the fact that about 25% of English is made up of German words and how that’s completely different from dialects of English where 99% of the words and grammar are exactly the same.

Yeah, not so much. Plus, as Leebo pointed out, it’s not a great example since it’s an exception.

大きい actually provides some pretty good examples.

大きい - adjective (おおきい家, big house)
大き - na-adjective (大きな熊, big bear)

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That’s not quite accurate either. 大き is not a word. The word is actually 大きな as a whole, and it can only be used in front of a noun and can’t be inflected. (I believe it’s called 連体詞.) Compare with きれい, which is a 形容動詞 (na-adjective).

  • :o: きれいな家
  • :o: 大きな家
  • :o: きれいだった家
  • :x: 大きだった家
  • :o: この家はきれい
  • :x: この家は大き
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That’s the story of my life with Japanese. :joy:

Cheers for the clarification.

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I’m glad no one mentioned adjectival nouns that can use both な and の, depending (but not always) on the context.

Oh wait… :sweat_smile:

But honestly, as @alo said, the whole “adjective” thing for の and な adjectives is more confusing than helpful. It’s more about “nouns describing other nouns”

About 同じ, there is also 同じそう which takes な and is listed in Jisho as a separate entry, but it feels like it’s just 同じ with the “seems like” そう slapped onto it.

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Can you link me to it?

Looks like I confused it with 同じよう :man_facepalming:
image

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So if someone wants to inflect that into past tense, they should use the i-adjective instead, like this: 大きかった家 ?

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That would work grammatically, sure, though it’s a silly example since the house probably isn’t shrinking. Whether you’d want 大きかった家(だ) or 大きい家だった probably depends on what you’re trying to say.

Also, in general you should probably stick to 大きい・小さい over 大きな・小さな. The latter versions are more poetic and tend to show up more in literature.

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English is a Germanic language, like Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Friesian, and (no big surprises) German. The words in German and English that are similar have a common root, but English didn’t get them from German any more than German got them from English (for the most part).

There are lots of French loan words in English though. French and English also have a common root in Indo-European, but long enough ago that it’s not immediately obvious.

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I’m not sure that’s not going a bit too far.
Yes, Old English came from Germanic languages, not German, but the Anglo Saxons that settled in Britain and shaped the language were speaking something close to Old Frisian or Old Low Saxon (Old Low German), which is pretty close to German, and much further from other languages like Norwegian. That’s why there’s still a lot of common ground between English and German, probably more so than between Norwegian or something (although all of the Germanic languages have similarities).
At least that’s my novice understanding from hearsay and cursory research just now.

Old English ( Ænglisċ, Anglisċ, Englisċ ) is the earliest form of the English language. It was brought to Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers, and was spoken and written in parts of what are now England and southeastern Scotland until the mid-12th century, by which time it had evolved into Middle English. Old English was a West Germanic language, closely related to Old Frisian and Old Saxon (Old Low German).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxons#Language
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English

(and not that it’s much of a merit here, but I’m also a native German speaker and I grew up around East Frisian, which is basically a mix of German, Dutch and English, though I only understand parts of it. But for what it’s worth, this very much matches my experience)

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Yes, old English was brought to Britain by the post-Roman invaders/settlers, the earlier inhabitants speaking some Celtic variant (and presumably a bit of Latin).

After the Norman invasion, old English transformed into middle English, and then 500 years later into pre-modern, and finally modern English. The massive transformation in grammar and pronunciation occurred in the change to middle English .

At the same time Old Low German, was transforming into middle low German, before being largely replaced by late high German, which forms the basis for modern German. High German separated from low German at roughly the same time that old English was being introduced to Britain. A modern version of low German is still spoken though.

A native speaker of modern German should be able to make sense of written middle low German, in much the same way that written middle English is intelligible to a modern English native. The sound changes for spoken language would take some getting used to in both cases though. Old German and old English were not written in a Latin alphabet, but if you did, old low German might well be more understandable to a German speaker, because English grammar is utterly different. Many individual words (house, cow, you, etc.) would be guessable, in some tenses.

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