The quick or short Language Questions Thread (not grammar)

I don’t see it used often either. @pm215 are these for specific contexts? I think I’ve see 上旬 and 下旬 only on WaniKani and when talking about sports seasons I think?

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It’s pretty normal for people to use them to refer to rough plans.

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I don’t get the impression they’re super common, but jpdb says they turn up in a couple of hundred of the books in the database, including examples like
まだ二学期が始まったばかりの九月の上旬である。
which isn’t sports specific or historical.

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It’s extremely common at business environment at least.

“when will you have it ready?”
“we are aiming for 5月上旬”

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It’s also pretty common in weather forecasts on the radio, where they describe the temperature as something like 「五月上旬並み」.

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Sure thing, it’s here

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Also super common for announcements about merchandise (not) coming out. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen it on predicted release times for figures and then delay announcements.

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Question.

Sometimes I see the okurigana of kanji being dropped in dictionaries, and I saw it happening in famous book titles as well but I can imagine it happens in a variety of situations. Is this just done for easiness of reading or what?
Like 葉隠れ聞き書き (the title of a book) is shortened into 葉隠聞書 even tho on the dictionary the words definition appear both shortened and complete, separately

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Specifically this, you don’t lose anything from abbreviating 聞き書き, since 聞書 is listening and writing.

But what do you mean by the last part?

In general, kanji allows you to remove the hiragana and keep the meaning, even if you’re not gonna be able to read it unless you either know the title or can deduce which words should be there, which is easy if you’re advanced.

Random example, I could say:

魚を食べるのが好き
or
魚食好

And you would probably be able to tell what I mean.

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Could you, though? I don’t think it’s possible to read the latter the same way as the former, so it’s not the same as the “sometimes okurigana aren’t shown separately when it’s a noun”. And 魚食好 has no google hits that aren’t Chinese.

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Nice, I didn’t know it was so customary, I thought it had some more meaning or nuance to cut okurigana down… this is all I need to know, thanks!

Interesting, how would you read the latter?

The wikipedia article on okurigana says:

In other words, in this kind of situation there’s a choice, and so it’s a style decision by the author. In titles or newspaper headlines or on signs the more compact form might be preferred. I’d say that putting in the okurigana at the end of a compound is most common, but it depends on the word too – 立入禁止 usually doesn’t have okurigana, for example.

As an example of the “no ambiguity” bit, you wouldn’t typically drop the furigana from 流行り (はやり) because 流行 is usually read りゅうこう.

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Perfectly clear, thanks for clarifying :slight_smile:

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Oh, having just looked this up, this book was written in the 1700s. Modern Japanese writing conventions therefore do not apply at all. (My impression is that modern Japanese is heavier on the okurigana than older texts, and in any case pre-1900 everything is Classical Japanese anyway.)

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Do you mean that back then they used to more frequently omit okurigana than today?

That’s my impression, though I haven’t tried to check statistics on it. The government didn’t publish official “this is how to write it” rules until after WW2, so there is more individual variation, I think, which means some authors prefer less okurigana than the modern standard.

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This may be a good question to a Japanese literature student then, maybe

I mean that I can do it, not that it’s grammatically correct, in this case. It’s an exaggerated version of abbreviating words.

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But writing 聞書 is grammatically correct, permitted by the orthographic rules and something you can see in the real world, so it doesn’t seem like a very good analogy… The book title isn’t “the author deliberately wrote something that’s not standard Japanese but that can be understood anyway”.

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I think to this one might add an addendum that if it’s clear from context for a native speaker and brevity is somehow a necessity, it’s also fine to drop okurigana.

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