252 CHAPTER 5. COUNTERS AND COUNTING
- Clock hours
Don’t confuse clock hours with durational hours. Clock hours are things
like ”three o’ clock” and ”seven in the evening”. Durational hours are ”it
took 3 hours” or ”I went home after waiting an hour”. This counter is for
the first category and indicates the hours of the day:
Note the pronunciations for and , both being the short
pronunciations. An example sentence would be:
”What time is it?”The indicators for a.m. and p.m. are
and
in Japanese,
indicating whether a time is before or after the ”hour of the horse”, which
corresponds to the period from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. according to the classical
Chinese system. These are prefixed to the time:
”It is 3 p.m.””Let us convene at 9 a.m.”To make the ”useful words” list complete,
means midday and
means midnight.- Durational hours
By adding the durational particle
- literally ”interval” – to the counter
, we get the durational counter for hours. The difference between clock