Teach Yourself Japanese
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Subject: Re: adjectives
From: ラディカル新米
Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2003 20:23:44 GMT
References: 1, 2
> > Descriptive verbs like 新しい, 高い, 安い, etc all end in い.
>
> They are called adjectives. I'm not sure what you mean by descriptive verbs. Do you mean verbs like 優れる and 秀でる?
>
> Adjectives and adjectival nouns have a similar function but they inflect differently.
Here is how my book explains descriptive verbs:
京都は古い町ですね。
There is a temptation to assume that because the word "old" in the English sentence "Kyôto is an old town" is an adjective, its Japanese counterpart here, 古い, is also an adjective; but this temptation should be resisted. It is in fact a kind of verb and inflects accordingly: 古い means "is old" and so 古い町 is literally "a town which is old". You should have no difficulty distinguishing these verbs from other verbs because they all end in the wovel い. We shall call them "descriptive verbs".
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