1.4. WORDS AND WORD CLASSES 37
word classes. A handful of special prefixes are used for things like marking
words ashonorific, performing ”inherent” negation (an English example
of which is ”the house was windowless” rather than ”the house had no
windows”), indicating repetitions (”rereading a book”) and acting as cate-
gory marker for categories such as ”new”, ”big” or ”most”, as well as some
more exotic categories such as extents or limits. These will be discussed in
detail in the chapter on particles, in the section on prefixes.
1.4.10 Onomatopoeia and mimesis
Two final word classes which are important to know when dealing with
Japanese are the onomatopoeic class, and the class ofmimesis. Quite a
mouthful,onomatopoeia(from the classical Greek onomato-, ”name”, and
poi- ”to make”) are words that are used to reflect the sounds that things
make. For instance, ”The heavy rock splooshed into the lake” is an exam-
ple of an onomatopoeic verb. It doesn’t tell us what the rock actually did –
namely, fall into the water – but implies it by virtue of the sound we know
a rock falling in water makes: ”sploosh”.
In addition to suchsoundwords, there are also statewords, which
do not indicate a particular sound, but indicate a particular property. Rare
in English, an example of this would be the word ”gloopy” when describ-
ing something. Calling something ”gloopy” doesn’t tell you something
objective about it, but you can surmise it’s probably a viscous liquid gel-
like consistency, as well as unpleasant to the touch.
While in English (and in most other western languages) using these
words is considered a sign of a poor grasp of the language (after all, why
use a word like ”gloopy” when you can call something a liquid but vis-
cous, unpleasant gel), and mainly associated with ”children’s language”,
in Japanese using onomatopoeia is essential to natural sounding language:
with thousands of these words available to choose from, each with its own
connotationsandimplications, picking the right onomatopoeia or mimesis
at the right time is something that demonstrates a high level of competency
in the language.
Onomatopoeia, called
(’giongo’, in which the ’gi’ part means
’to mimic’, the ’on’ part means ’sound’, and the ’go’ part means ’word’)
and mimesis, called
(’gitaigo’, in which ’tai’ means condition or
state), are some of the hardest words to learn, as they usually carry very
specific nuances in meaning. For instance, in relation to a leaking faucet,
a Japanese person might say ”the water was dripping out”, picking one