Japanese Grammar - Nouns

Nouns

Japanese has no grammatical gender, number, or articles (though the demonstrative その, sono, "that, those", is often translatable as "the"). Thus, specialists have agreed that Japanese nouns are noninflecting: 猫 neko can be translated as "cat", "cats", "a cat", "the cat", "some cats" and so forth, depending on context. However, as part of the extensive pair of grammatical systems that Japanese possesses for honorification (making discourse deferential to the addressee or even to a third party) and politeness, nouns too can be modified. Nouns take politeness prefixes (which have not been regarded as inflections): o- for native nouns, and go- for Sino-Japanese nouns. A few examples are given in the following table. In a few cases, there is suppletion, as with the first of the examples given below, 'rice'. (Note that while these prefixes are almost always in Hiragana — that is, as お o- or ご go — the kanji 御 is used for both o and go prefixes in formal writing.)

Lacking number, Japanese does not differentiate between count and mass nouns. (An English speaker learning Japanese would be well advised to treat Japanese nouns as mass nouns.) A small number of nouns have collectives formed by reduplication (possibly accompanied by voicing and related processes (rendaku)); for example: hito 'person' and hitobito 'people'. Reduplication is not productive. Words in Japanese referring to more than one of something are collectives, not plurals. Hitobito, for example, means "a lot of people" or "people in general". It is never used to mean "two people". A phrase like edo no hitobito would be taken to mean "the people of Edo", or "the population of Edo", not "two people from Edo" or even "a few people from Edo". Similarly, yamayama means "many mountains".

A limited number of nouns have collective forms that refer to groups of people. Examples include watashi-tachi, 'we'; anata-tachi, 'you (plural)'; bokura, 'we (less formal, more masculine)'. One uncommon personal noun, ware, 'I', or in some cases, 'you', has a much more common reduplicative collective form wareware 'we'.

The suffixes -tachi (達) and -ra (等) are by far the most common collectivizing suffixes. These are, again, not pluralizing suffixes: tarō-tachi does not mean "some number of people named Taro", but instead indicates the group including Taro. Depending on context, tarō-tachi might be translated into "Taro and his friends", "Taro and his siblings", "Taro and his family", or any other logical grouping that has Taro as the representative. Some words with collectives have become fixed phrases and (commonly) refer to one person. Specifically, kodomo 'child' and tomodachi 'friend' can be singular, even though -omo and -achi were originally collectivizing in these words; to unambiguously refer to groups of them, an additional collectivizing suffix is added: kodomotachi 'children' and tomodachitachi 'friends', though tomodachitachi is somewhat uncommon. Tachi is sometimes applied to inanimate objects, kuruma 'car' and kuruma-tachi, 'cars', for example, but this usage is colloquial and indicates a high level of anthropomorphisation and childlikeness, and is not more generally accepted as standard.