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Can you explain this about numbers? - 07-30-2008, 05:45 PM

Ok, thanx mainly to the 東京新聞, now I am confused
I go to the Newspaper of the Japanese capital city everyday and read an article. I really don't understand yet everything word by word I guess coz it is too early for me, but the general meaning (sometimes not even that hee hee). I find always parts of grammar that I don't know yet and that prevents me from understanding, but it gets me used to seeing such grammar forms.

Now there is something that I had studied and I found on the newspaper different, so I am no longer sure which one is correct and which one is not.
I know that to count with counters there are a couple of ways to do it.
For example to say 3 cats I can either say 猫三匹 or 三匹の猫. At most I can separate them by putting the number in front of the verb as in 猫が三匹います.
Now I see on the newspaper that many times they do the opposite. For example something I see often is about number of people who died where instead of writing 二人の死亡 or 死亡二人 they write 二人死亡.

Am I missing something there?
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Harold (Offline)
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07-30-2008, 07:10 PM

Quote:
Originally Posted by chryuop View Post
Ok, thanx mainly to the 東京新聞, now I am confused
I go to the Newspaper of the Japanese capital city everyday and read an article. I really don't understand yet everything word by word I guess coz it is too early for me, but the general meaning (sometimes not even that hee hee). I find always parts of grammar that I don't know yet and that prevents me from understanding, but it gets me used to seeing such grammar forms.

Now there is something that I had studied and I found on the newspaper different, so I am no longer sure which one is correct and which one is not.
I know that to count with counters there are a couple of ways to do it.
For example to say 3 cats I can either say 猫三匹 or 三匹の猫. At most I can separate them by putting the number in front of the verb as in 猫が三匹います.
Now I see on the newspaper that many times they do the opposite. For example something I see often is about number of people who died where instead of writing 二人の死亡 or 死亡二人 they write 二人死亡.

Am I missing something there?
I think that's how they always do it, for dead and injured people... Even on television that's how it works. Every time someone died, in the news cast it would show 一人死亡 in the little bar at the bottom of the screen.

English news titles don't always have correct grammar either. In English, the titles always get to the point. "2 dead, 3 injured, and 1 missing." sort of thing


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07-30-2008, 08:50 PM

Ok thank you. I was skipping the titles of the articles coz I was thinking something like that and I usually go straight to the article...didn't think I would find those kind of short cut in the articles too.
Thank you very much, now I know to keep a more open mind when I go through the articles
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07-30-2008, 10:30 PM

I suspect the use of だ instead of である in newspapers is usually to cut down on space too. I remember hearing something like that.


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07-30-2008, 10:57 PM

Quote:
Originally Posted by chryuop View Post
Now I see on the newspaper that many times they do the opposite. For example something I see often is about number of people who died where instead of writing 二人の死亡 or 死亡二人 they write 二人死亡.

Am I missing something there?
You`re considering 死亡 to be the same category as 猫. Think of it as something closer to a verb. 猫 is something that is 居る. 死亡 is something that you する. They`re completely different word types from the beginning, so it`s futile to try and apply the same rules to them.


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07-30-2008, 11:56 PM

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You`re considering 死亡 to be the same category as 猫. Think of it as something closer to a verb. 猫 is something that is 居る. 死亡 is something that you する. They`re completely different word types from the beginning, so it`s futile to try and apply the same rules to them.
Interesting, thanx alot. I guess I need to start looking deeper at things and stop looking at them as pure grammar pieces...not always a noun is a noun.
Thanx, lesson learnt.
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