An introduction to Japanese - Syntax, Grammar & Language

92 CHAPTER 3. MORE GRAMMAR

For verbal adjectives, things are a bit more complicated, because
using an adjective as a noun requires you to know what kind of noun you
want to use. For instance, in English we can turn the adjective ”deep” into
the noun ”depth”. This noun is then ambiguous in meaning: do we mean
a measurable depth, like the depth of a crevasse or a lake, or do we mean
the immeasurable quality of ”depth” of paintings or poetry, for instance?
In Japanese, this ambiguity doesn’t exist, because the two different inter-
pretations are expressed through different noun forms: turning a verbal
adjective into a measurable (quantifiable) noun requires adding to the
stem, whereas turning it into an immeasurable (qualifying) noun requires
adding to the stem:

adjective meaning quantified noun meaning

high height (ie. of a mountain)

deep depth (ie. of a lake)

adjective meaning qualified noun meaning

high height (ie. of an achievement or position)

deep depth (ie. of a poem or painting)

In addition to these two, there’s also , or (all pronunciations
for ), which instead of creating a quantified noun or qualified noun, cre-
ates a noun that stands for ”having the impression of”. To use this in a
sentence, it is used as a noun adjective (as itself is a noun adjective):

adjective meaning impression noun meaning

cold

the sense/feeling of being cold

dangerous

the sense/feeling of danger

firm, honest

instilling a sense/feeling of honesty

There are two notes to this scheme. The most important one is: ”this
does not apply to all adjectives”. That may sound odd, but it comes down
to the fact that while grammatically these rules are valid for all verbal adjec-
tive, Japanese has been in use for many centuries, and verbal adjectives for
which this kind ofnominalisingmade sense have long since been accepted
as words on their own, while verbal adjectives for which this nominalising