38 CHAPTER 1. THE SYNTAX
specific word from among a great number of onomatopoeia to indicate
whether the dripping was intermiĴent or continuous, whether the drips
were light or heavy, whether their impact in the sink was almost silent
or accompanied by backsplash noises, each of these qualities being repre-
sented by a different onomatopoeic word.
Because of this, onomatopoeia and mimesis are an unofficial yard-
stick when it comes to learning Japanese: if you can use the right ono-
matopoeic expression at the right time, you have mastered a crucial ele-
ment to speaking natural sounding Japanese.
1.4.11 Compound words.
This is technically not a word class, but a language feature: in some lan-
guages several words can be combined into single words with more mean-
ing that just the individual parts. This practice, called compounding, is
something that some languages have a knack for, and some languages
simply do not bother with. English, for instance, is a language in which
compoundwords are rare – although not unheard of.
A common English compound word is the word ”teapot”, for in-
stance. Combining from the nouns ”tea” and ”pot”, this would have to be
a pot for tea. However, it’s not really a pot, it’s more a decanter. Similarly,
the ”tea” in question is never dry tea leaf, even though that’s also called
”tea” in English; it has to be boiled water infused with tea leaf. So, the sin-
gle compound noun ”teapot” has more meaning than if you looked at the
meaning of just the two nouns it was built from.
This ”joining up two (or more) words to form new, single words”
is one of the major dividing lines we can use when trying to classify lan-
guages: English is a language sparse in compound words, as are French,
Spanish and Italian, but German, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Polish, Hungar-
ian, Arabian, and also Japanese, are languages in which compound words
are frequently used.
In Japanese, nouns are not the only compound words available –
compound adjectives as well as compound verbs are also quite common.
1.5 Sentence structure.
In addition to knowing which word classes are used in a language, we
can also look at languages in terms of how sentences are structured. The
most simplistic categorisation of languages in this respect is by looking
at the ”Subject,ObjectandVerb” ordering. This categorisation looks at