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Japanese Plurals


OriginalRen

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Not enough flame wars.

But for real, I'm not familiar with any authority that has established such a rule. All German nouns are capitalized, yet "sauerkraut" and "schadenfreude" are acceptably lowercase in English. As is "sauerkrautschadenfreude," which is probably a word for them!

So if anyone says "ninjas" instead of "ninja," or "shoguns" instead of "shogun," or "tycoons" instead of "tycoon," then how about we don't report them to this guy.

To be fair, not every word does that. Fish? Fish. Moose? Moose. Anime? Anime. Something can still be plural without an "s" ending; the words I mentioned in the OP shouldn't use it.

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Not enough flame wars.

But for real, I'm not familiar with any authority that has established such a rule. All German nouns are capitalized, yet "sauerkraut" and "schadenfreude" are acceptably lowercase in English. As is "sauerkrautschadenfreude," which is probably a word for them!

So if anyone says "ninjas" instead of "ninja," or "shoguns" instead of "shogun," or "tycoons" instead of "tycoon," then how about we don't report them to this guy.

To be fair, not every word does that. Fish? Fish. Moose? Moose. Anime? Anime. Something can still be plural without an "s" ending; the words I mentioned in the OP shouldn't use it.

I concur, but I may be missing a premise, because I don't see how the existence of words without distinct plurals necessitates Japanese loanwords to follow the same pattern.

To go back to my vague analogy, there are nouns in English that are always capitalized, such as names or places, but I don't think that has any bearing on whether we should capitalize German loanwords because that's what their grammar does.

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Can we just agree that English rules are usually decided by what the first thing that comes out of your ass when you give it a little pull is?

"Cactus" is often pluralized as "cacti", but you rarely see people use "ani" instead of "anuses".

This one in particular probably has something to do with cactus coming directly from latin where the plural masculine is -i from the singular masculine of -us, versus anus which according to wiktionary uncitedly apparently passed through french first :shrug:

Either way, retro loan words should still follow the initial language's grammar structure unless it has been modified in some way.

Then again I hate seeing people japanize english loanwords.  It's fucking cake, not keki.  Stop being retarded.

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Can we just agree that English rules are usually decided by what the first thing that comes out of your ass when you give it a little pull is?

"Cactus" is often pluralized as "cacti", but you rarely see people use "ani" instead of "anuses".

I honestly never hard anyone refer to more than one asshole before. English has many rules that have exceptions to those rules and an exception to that as well. Although in school, they leave out the exception to the exception. 

 

For Ex: I before e except after c

 

We have all heard of this. But teachers forget to mention to you until high school the exception to the exception.

 

Except in eigh like neighbor and weigh.

 

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 For Ex: I before e except after c

 

We have all heard of this.

 

No. I didn't. And there is a need to separate prescriptive rules from descriptive rules here.

I'll just go along with whatever the dominant usage is, be it animes or otakus, as long as they are sensical. 

Anyway, here is some usage I've gathered.

"Too much anime." (as an activity)

"New anime this season" (as a category) as in "New anime this season includes one punch man, noragami 2, gundam..."

"I watched a lot of anime lately." (as an activity)

 

...but in certain cases...

"Animes that will haunt you" (as specifying a group of anime)

(will mean differently than "Anime that will haunt you", given that certain headlines omit quantifiers like 'an' or 'a') 

"The worst anime in 2015" will also be different from "The worst animes in 2015" in English.

 

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English generally doesn't give a shit about the plural form of loanwords. Never has, never will.

Can we just agree that English rules are usually decided by what the first thing that comes out of your ass when you give it a little pull is?

"Cactus" is often pluralized as "cacti", but you rarely see people use "ani" instead of "anuses".

However, "cactuses"  is still a perfectly valid word. "Flexible" would be the kind way to describe the English language. It barely matters what you do, really, just as long as it makes sense. Don't let the grammar nazis get you down, especially not the weeaboo grammar nazis. 

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 For Ex: I before e except after c

 

We have all heard of this.

 

Anyway, here is some usage I've gathered.

"Too much anime." (as an activity)

"New anime this season" (as a category) as in "New anime this season includes one punch man, noragami 2, gundam..."

"I watched a lot of anime lately." (as an activity)

 

...but in certain cases...

"Animes that will haunt you" (as specifying a group of anime)

(will mean differently than "Anime that will haunt you", given that certain headlines omit quantifiers like 'an' or 'a') 

"The worst anime in 2015" will also be different from "The worst animes in 2015" in English.

 

None of this makes coherent sense. Anime is not a verb so it can't be an activity. There was also no difference between The Worst Anime in 2915 and the Worst Animes in 2015 in English except that I've never heard anyone say Animes as the plural form. If someone says the Top 10 Worst Anime, you know it is the plural form.

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First, I apologise for my inconsistency with the term activity and category. Let's just say anime is a category when we discuss its noncount usage.

Count: There are eleven animes this season.

Noncount: Anime is love, anime is life.

 

As for difference between singular and plural, let's put it side by side so it's easier to understand.

'The worst anime in 2015' implies there may only be one worst anime, even if everyone knows that anime can mean one or more than one.

'The worst animes in 2015' implies there are definitely more than one bad anime.

 

If this isn't convincing enough, try this.

'The best anime this season'

'The best animes this season'

It's natural to use these expressions without quantifiers!

 

I am not arguing that 'Top 10 Worst Anime' is not a viable option. I'm saying there is no need to give up the usage of the plural form of anime, as suggested in this thread.

 

 

 

Edited by Pudding321
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Well someone is angry. I guess you can be salty, sure.

You don't know the half of it. I was sitting there smelling delicious Thanksgiving dishes cooking for 6 hours straight, and it was driving me absolutely mad. Never post hungry.

I'm just glad I didn't do anything really rash like rob a liquor store or sign up for AOL or something.

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Either way, retro loan words should still follow the initial language's grammar structure unless it has been modified in some way.

There is no should or shouldn't, as far as I'm concerned. Acceptable usage of loan words is determined, well, by how people end up using them. A preferred form usually arises and dominates over time, and often has no regard for rhyme or reason. 

We're under no obligation to follow the initial language's grammar (though we can, if we choose). One might say, "In Japanese grammar, nouns are neither singular or plural, so you shouldn't pluralize them in English." Okay. But in Japanese grammar, there are no definite or indefinite articles either (as per Funnerific's screengrab) so perhaps we should also avoid using those with loan words. We could say things like, "Are you going to anime convention?" and "I forgot to turn hibachi on."

Or imagine you move into a new apartment and your parents loan you a small table. "Great!" you say. "I'm going to use this as a nightstand in my bedroom." They frown. "Honey, your father and I use this by the front hall. We put our keys and mail on it when we walk in. So that's how you should use it." You frown, then thank your lucky stars you moved out when you did. Point being, a table is still a table -- it doesn't suddenly become a chandelier -- but how you choose to use it is entirely up to you.

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I guess it's (once again) a prescriptive vs. descriptive approach issue.

I'm not a fan of prescriptive institutions, since they are often basing their prescriptions off not very well-founded positions. I don't know about the english language prescriptive authorities but the Académie Française is pretty retarded sometimes.

A prescriptive approach isn't going to work any tiny bit on spoken language anyway. No linguist ever cares about prescription, linguistics are all about description. Rules are not set in stone, they evolve based on numerous processes, and they're not even unique: everyone uses his own personal version of what is grouped by convention as a common language. Basically, rules come after the language, not before.

Of course there are reasons to be a bit more careful about the way we write on the internet. First, written speech lacks features of oral speech that can carry meanings: tone, speed, specific speech patterns and peculiarities, behavior, etc... Not unrelated, our brain is pretty amazing at doing top-down processing in oral speech, and while pretty good it's just not as good in written speech. Writing in garbage english will also affect the image you give of yourself, and is a lack of respect for the person you're talking to.

So yeah, there are good reasons to make an effort to use correct english. But for situations like this, I don't think there's any point in trying to find a prescription. Let's just see how it goes. There's very little chance that it will hinder communication, and even if it was a little bit of a hinder it would go away quickly because our brain is also fucking good at adapting to all sorts of speech environments (Remember the first time you went to 4chan and didn't understand one bit of wtf those guys were saying, only to be completely at ease with it a few days later. Okay maybe that example won't apply to everyone).

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