4.2. PARTICLES 163instance, if it was a starlit night and we wanted to say that all the lights were
causing the lake to sparkle, we would say something like the following:”The lake sparkled.”In this sentence, the word is a state description word (called
’mimesis’ in English), which paired with becomes an adverb to the verb. Literally, then, this construction would say that the lake is ’doing’
. Similarly, sound description words (called ’onomatopoeia’ in
English) are treated in the same way:
”The rain came pouring down.”Here, the onomatopoeic word is not found in the translation,
because in English – as in most Western languages – we do not use such
words to any serious degree. In Japanese, however, these words are an es-
sential part of natural sounding language: the translation states that rain
came ”pouring down”, because is the sound that rain pouring down
makes. Before you now go thinking up all kinds of onomatopoeia yourself,
Japanese has been in use for centuries, and virtually any onomatopoeia
you might come up with already exists, in a very specific form. There are
in fact dictionaries which will list all of them by category
and meaning (you may find one online on nihonogouresources.com for
instance), so you’re not free to come up with your own; there are several
hundred well established onomatopoeia and mimeses, each typically with
at least a handful of interpretations depending on what they relate to, lead-
ing to well over a thousand different uses. It is not surprise, then, that a
mastery of onomatopoeia and mimeses is typically seen as having mas-
tered conversational Japanese.
In fact, this adverbial marking of things using extends beyond
just the and , and through this extending becomes a bit more
complex too: a popular way to explain this is to call the quoting particle,
and give an example such as the following to illustrate this:”(I/you/he/she/it/we/they) said (I/you/he/she/it/we/they)’ll be coming
over right now.”This clearly demonstrates a quote being recited, but things are not
quite that simple; will work with a much wider variety of things than