[Multilingual Monday] Wa, ga, word order, bad advice
It's embarrassing, certainly, but I admit: even after years of use in the Japanese language, I still fuck up fundamentally grammatical points. Like wa and ga. These two particles, for those who don't speak Japanese, are a "topic marker" and a "subject marker" respectively, and are not interchangeable, even if their general use (connecting a predicate to the rest of the sentence) is the same. There are certain reasons to use one over another, in certain conditions, or sometimes both are possible but convey different nuances. it's no shock, really, that I screw these up, as this is one of those "no equivalent in my own language" things" that's bound to be FUBARed a some point by a non-native speaker, much like the preterit vs. imperfect in Spanish.
And of course there's a plethora of bad and just plain false information that doesn't help non-native speakers. At one point people got the idea that ga was for positive statements and wa for negative statements, or that ga put emphasis on things prior to it and wa put emphasis on things afterwords. And each of these is based on SOME amount of truth (indeed, wa is seen in its fair share of negative statements, and ga DOES emphasis a subject), but their uses are much more complicated.
Not helping matters any: I have a book on learning Arabic, which is WRITTEN in Japanese. At one point Arabic word order is discussed, and the sentence "Muhammad drank coffee" is examined, with the sentence being written both as شرب محمد قهوة, Sharab Muhamad qahwah, but also as محمد شرب قهوة, Muhamad sharab qahwah. What does this have to do with anything, you might ask? Simple -- it's the Japanese explanations that come WITH the sentences. The first one gets explained with the Japanese sentence, ムハマドは珈琲を飲みました, and the following is explained with ムハマドが珈琲を飲みました. That is to say: Muhamado wa kouhii wo nomimashita vs. Muhamado wa kouhii wo nominashita. Again, it's wa vs. ga, but as far as I understand in Arabic, it was more about emphasis, which would immediately mean that this wa/ga comparison is flawed. Wa seems to have more of an implication of, "as for ..._______ (but who knows about anything else!)", whereas ga is more "specifically this person/object". Meaning, the two sentences would then be translated as:
"Muhammad drank coffee -- and maybe some other people, but at least Muhammad."
"It was specifically Muhammad that drank coffee."
Oy, language is hard.
And of course there's a plethora of bad and just plain false information that doesn't help non-native speakers. At one point people got the idea that ga was for positive statements and wa for negative statements, or that ga put emphasis on things prior to it and wa put emphasis on things afterwords. And each of these is based on SOME amount of truth (indeed, wa is seen in its fair share of negative statements, and ga DOES emphasis a subject), but their uses are much more complicated.
Not helping matters any: I have a book on learning Arabic, which is WRITTEN in Japanese. At one point Arabic word order is discussed, and the sentence "Muhammad drank coffee" is examined, with the sentence being written both as شرب محمد قهوة, Sharab Muhamad qahwah, but also as محمد شرب قهوة, Muhamad sharab qahwah. What does this have to do with anything, you might ask? Simple -- it's the Japanese explanations that come WITH the sentences. The first one gets explained with the Japanese sentence, ムハマドは珈琲を飲みました, and the following is explained with ムハマドが珈琲を飲みました. That is to say: Muhamado wa kouhii wo nomimashita vs. Muhamado wa kouhii wo nominashita. Again, it's wa vs. ga, but as far as I understand in Arabic, it was more about emphasis, which would immediately mean that this wa/ga comparison is flawed. Wa seems to have more of an implication of, "as for ..._______ (but who knows about anything else!)", whereas ga is more "specifically this person/object". Meaning, the two sentences would then be translated as:
"Muhammad drank coffee -- and maybe some other people, but at least Muhammad."
"It was specifically Muhammad that drank coffee."
Oy, language is hard.