Role of に in お気の毒 に

[wildjasmin296741]

こんにちわ皆さん,

にis one of the most difficult particles for me to comprehend . I wonder what kind of role に plays in the following sentence:
それわ お気の毒 に。　(That’s really too bad!)

ありがとう　ございます.

Jasmine

[ericf]

こんにちは、ジャスミンさん。

As far as I know it's a contraction of
これは、お気の毒に思います。

And in this case I think に is being used as the indirect object marker (or agent marker?) rather than the location/time/direction marker that you might have learnt already.

Jay Rubin's book "Making Sense of Japanese" is well worth a read for explanations of に & で and also は & が. I think there's a whole chapter each devoted to those to difficult pairs of particles. And it's a fun read.

PS wa, as a particle, is written は not わ - it's still pronounced wa. But I suspect you knew that.

[wildjasmin296741]

こんにちは、エリクさん、

Thank you for the explanation and the book recommendation. I will take a peek at the book on Amazon.

I didn't know the "wa" in こんにちは should be "は" although I knew in 私は, it is "は". Thank you for letting me know.

ども　ありがとう　ございます。

Jasmine

[community.japanese]

ジャスミンさん、エリックさん、
こんにちは

Yeah...particles are a bit confusing, aren't they?
It seems エリックsan delivered a perfect help! Thank you very much

Thank you very much also for book information! I'm sure a lot of Japanese learners would appreciate
such information.

ジャスミンsan, anytime you're not sure about particles, please feel free to ask

Natsuko(奈津子),
Team JapanesePod101.com

[ericf]

こんにちは。

No problem. I think the only other kana character that has two pronunciations is 「へ」. In a word it's 'he' as normal, but as the directional particle it becomes 'e'. http://www.jgram.org/pages/viewOne.php? ... les2#part4

Why these pronunciation changes anyway? As far as I know it's historical; either to do with the writing reforms of the 1940's or pronunciation/writing in the Heian period. There's more (a lot more) here:
http://www.sljfaq.org/afaq/historical-kana-usage.html

[community.japanese]

エリックさん、
you're right; it have quite much to do with historical process and backgrounds.
Assuming you've got quite a good understanding s about JP languages, I can even give you a bit of
"advanced" info about paticles: languages (Japanese anyway) followed quite a changes and if you go back
to some hundreds ago, there was not particle "no" and it appeared after some time ending up seperating
some meanings of particle "ga".

Pronounciations of particles have a lot to do with "old" or "antient" Japanese.
Languages always have some kind of connection to the "past" or old usages.
It might be interesting for you to study "old Japanese"

I bet you're quite much into deep linguistics, and if there's anything I could answer to your questions,
I'd be really happy to, so feel free to post your opinions or wonderings (or, anything really )

Natsuko(奈津子),
Team JapanesePod101.com

[ericf]

奈津子さん、
I think I'd heard somewhere long long ago that の and が were the same or similar, so thanks for the reminder - and explanation.

It's interesting to find the reasons for, or history behind, irregularities in a language. For example は and へ as simple characters or particles. Or lost hiragana like ゐ and ゑ - where there others? Or even "lost" kanji like 艮（ごん）、巽（そん）、坤（こん）、乾（けん）。Of course, those are 旧字体, old character forms, replaced by 北東、南東、南西、北西 so they're not lost as such, just not used. Or so I thought! I was surprised to see one of those old characters (I can't remember which for sure now but possibly 乾) on a sign in Matsumotojo, labelling one of the towers. It was a very old looking sign.

I aslo wonder why in Japanese you have northeast, 北東, but in Mandarin (as I understand if) it's eastnorth, 东北 etc？（东 is simplified 東）Probably the migration of those words into Japanese predates the change in usage from 艮 to 北東 and Japan and China ordered the kanji pair the other way around?

English has its own missing characters, about half a dozen. Also changes in pronunciation - 大母音推移　
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%A4%A7% ... 8%E7%A7%BB
(There's an English version of that linked on the lefthand side.)

もう遅いので今日はこの辺までにします。

[community.japanese]

エリックさん、
wow
I actually have no knowledge about Chinese at all, nor much about old Japanese
As far as I'm concerned, old hiragana which are not used any longer are only ゐ and ゑ whish are both in
Y+[vowel]. As you might know, づ and ぢ is used only for specific words, so those might join ゐ and ゑ in the
future....

Japanese people are lazy like me so there must be many simplified kanjis....
In any way, some kanjis are different from Chinese ones these days, and, if I remember correctly,
Chinese also have simplified and complicated (traditional) ones (the former should be Mandarin and the latter
should be Cantonese, but I'm not too sure...)
I don't think Japanese people changed the original to make them more compicated; they could have
changed complicated kanjis to simple ways as they were lazy like me ( )

Seeing the historical changes in any languages is very interesting (at least for me)! So, thank you very much
for the link; I didn't actually know that there were "missing characters" in English! That's new...it'd be added
to my "nerd hobby"

Natsuko(奈津子),
Team JapanesePod101.com