2.3. NOUN INFLECTION 73
orange juice, milk and tea, and that’s all they bought, then we can list all
these things with :
”(I) bought juice, milk and tea.”However, if they instead bought a lot of refreshments (say they were
planning a party), then the following sentence would be easier than listing
every individual item on the shopping list:
”(I) bought juice, milk, tea and the like.”That’s the only difference between and (for the purpose of
noun listing). Both form a list of items, and by using you imply that
what you describe is the whole list, while if you use you imply that
even though it’s a list, it’s not the whole list, just a representative snippet.
Of course, it (almost) goes without saying that you cannot mix and.
2.3.2 Inflection.
Actual inflection of nouns relies on copula verbs, as it does in English.
While in English only the verb ”to be” fulfils the role of copula, in Japanese
there are a number of copulae to pick from. So, for the moment, we will
look at the two most common copulae: the plain form and its polite
counterpart,. Technically, these are both verbs, although is some-
what more complicated than. If we look at their verb bases, we see
the following:
copula( )
/
/First, there is no
, which kind of makes sense - one cannot or-
der something to all of a sudden have some property; chairs don’t become
red because you order them to, people don’t become angry just because