6.1. COMPARISONS, PREFERENCES AND CHOICE 281
This noun suffix is comparable to the English suffix ”-ish”:
”Kimiko’s kind of a tomboy isn’t she?”
This sentence literally reads ”Kimiko’s man-ish, don’t you think?”
This suffix also works to indicate traits in something:
”Don’t you think this food tastes kind of French?”
This sentence literally reads ”Don’t you think this food is French-
ish?”
Using ... is the strongest comparison that can be made, as it
doesn’t so much liken two (or more) things to each other, but explicitly
claims they are identical in some way.
The noun is actually an odd word, a remnant of the classical
Japanese , not quite fiĴing in the modern verbal adjective class, nor
fiĴing in the noun adjective class. It can be used as a noun, such as in the
following sentence:
”This room is the same as the neighbouring one.”
But rather than being used with , like noun adjectives, it instead
uses the old , :
A:
B:
A: ”I am Ishida, 2nd year university student.”
B: ”I am Uematsu, also a 2nd year university student.”
Of course, B literally says ”I am Uematsu, the same”, but unlike in
for instance English, it is not impolite in Japanese to omit this contextually
already present information, since Japanese is a language in which context
is presumed to remain known throughout a conversation.
