The past tense should be atatakakatta. A bit of a tongue twister!
Or worse: “whether it was warm or not” = atatakakatta ka atatakakunakatta ka
A good demonstration of the verb-like-ness of i-adjectives is that the negative verb ending nai is also one (or at least acts like one, I don’t know the exact grammatical details) and can be inflected in the same ways.
The usual way of saying that something is becoming a certain adjective is -ku naru, like atatakaku naru, “become warm.” (A form of the verb naru is also where the na in na-adjectives came from)
So if we put these things together, then we end up with naku naru, “become not,” which is used as a euphemism for death.
It absolutely should have been atatakakatta, thank you. I wanted to say above that Japanese is agglutinative[1], and once you put -nai onto an i-adjective, it really is just another i-adjective that you can apply the same sort of modification to[2]. I don’t know enough about the Japanese language or Japanese linguistics to be sure that that’s actually what’s going on, but at the very least it’s an easy way to remember it.
Classifications like these are spectra rather than clear, sharp boundaries, but it’s literally a textbook example of an agglutinative languge. (The other usual example is Turkish, but I know nothing about it.) ↩︎
Except you can’t make it negative again; even a language with a word like atatakakunakatta has limits. ↩︎
People tend not to say it that way, and not just because it’s a mess. It makes a good tongue twister, but a more literal English translation would be something like “whether it was warm or it was not warm,” which better conveys how this version is a bit wordy.
A more idiomatic expression that is in common use is ka dou ka which is much easier to say. (e.g., atatakakatta ka dou ka = whether or not it was warm)
German has the word “doch” for this. But no clear word afaik for confirming a negative question: Teachers will probably tell you that confirming a negative sentence has to be done with Ja/Yes (which is logically correct), but pretty much ervery normal citizen will say No/Nein. Edit: Or maybe Genau/Exactly will do it.
“O” as a term (not “Oh” with an h, just the letter o) is a poetic exclamation used to signify that you’re talking directly to someone or something (could be an abstract concept too)
O come all ye faithful
O! say can you see by the dawn’s early light
O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree
O, Canada, our home and native land
O captain, my captain
O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?
Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy.
This is part of a literary device called “poetic apostrophe”.
i know i was irritated in the other thread about someone arguing against my deleted post as being gauche but since this is a positive addition and not argument i think it’s better, still let me know if you’d prefer me to delete/not acknowledge
Interesting. I think in Portuguese it’s simply called “vocativo”, which is something that exists to address the object (I think it’s the “object”. It’s been a couple of decades since those lessons, and it never came up again).
Thinking about it right now, it’s reasonable to imagine that “vocativo” may come from the verb “invocar”, which is “to invoke”. Certainly we are invoking Romeo, Canada, the captain, etc.
After doing some very quick and basic research I should have done before posting, I realised that in fact we do also call it the apostrophe, and that the vocative is the case used for that apostrophe. So I ended up not contributing much, in my haste to post.
Something similar happened a few days ago, when the news reported that Nathanyu was mocking reports of his death by saying “I’m dead for some coffee”, and I made a whole post about how interesting it was that in Portuguese we say something similar, and even mentioned a filmed that had a title that punned on it. Then, only minutes after I posted, I facepalmed hard as I remembered the expression “dying to”. Like, duh, it’s the same thing. So I deleted that one too.
I do like me some etimology digging. You can uncover fascinating things.
…I also like etimology wondering-about-without-doing-any-digging-because-it’s-neat-but-it’s-not-worth-the-effort. But that’s a secret. Shhhh. Don’t tell anyone.
The OED offers no etymology for this “o”, but the Middle English Compendium derives it from Latin ō (via French), which means the same thing. Latin, in turn, got it from Ancient Greek ῶ (ô). Where does the Ancient Greek one come from? I do not know.
I’m curious if this vocative “o” appears in any languages not influenced by Latin/Greek. Is it an Indo-European thing, or even a universal expressive sound, like how a lot of languages have “ah” and “ow”?
I was just wondering, though, is the O in “O come all ye faithful” and “O! say can you see” a vocative too? Those really feel more like “apostrofes”, or, pre-sentence exclamation marks. Interjections. Or stuff.
