Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Concept
Japanese counter word
Summary
In Japanese, counter words or counters (助数詞, ) are measure words used with numbers to count things, actions, and events. Counters are added directly after numbers. There are numerous counters, and different counters are used depending on the kind or shape of nouns that are being described.
In Japanese, as in Chinese and Korean, numerals cannot quantify nouns by themselves (except, in certain cases, for the numbers from one to ten; see below). For example, to express the idea "two dogs" in Japanese one could say 二匹の犬 (literally "two small-animal-count POSSESSIVE dog"), or 犬二匹 (literally "dog two small-animal-count"), but just pasting 二 and 犬 together in either order is ungrammatical. Here 二 is the number "two", 匹 is the counter for small animals, の is the possessive particle (a reversed "of", similar to the " 's" in "John's dog"), and 犬 is the word "dog".
Counters are not independent words; they must appear with a numeric prefix. The number can be imprecise: 何 or, less commonly, 幾 , can both be used to mean "some/several/many", and, in questions, "what/how many/how much". For example, "some guests" can be translated as 何名様 (lit. "some people-count honored-ones"), and "how many guests?" as 何名様? (lit. "what people-count honored-ones QUESTION"). Some nouns prefer 幾 , as in 幾晩? "how many nights?" and 幾日も行っていた "I was gone for many days."
Counters are similar in function to the word "pieces" in "two pieces of paper" or "cups" in "two cups of coffee". However, they cannot take non-numerical modifiers. So while "two pieces of paper" translates fairly directly as 紙二枚 (lit. "paper two flat-count"), "two green pieces of paper" must be rendered as 緑の紙二枚 , akin to "two pieces of green paper".
Just as in English, different counters can be used to convey different types of quantity. In English, one can say "one loaf of bread" or "one slice of bread". In Japanese, the equivalents would be パン一斤 (lit. "bread one-loaf") and パン一枚 (lit. "bread one-flat-count"). There are numerous counters, and depending on the kind or shape of nouns the number is describing, different counters are used.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.