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I’m not sure whether this belongs in Japanese Language forum of the Textfugu one, but I got to a section on sentence enders containing the example:
みんな がくせい なのよ
Everyone is a studentI get what the enders mean, but do they function as a verb as well(and if not, where is it)?
AnonymousThe “verb” is implied. In complete form it would be なのだよ, but since だ can make a girl sound too masculine depending on context and sentence, the copula だ is omitted and なのよ is used instead. However, girls also need to be careful using this since it can make them sound too feminine depending on context and sentence.
The copula is the verb that goes where no verb is needed. As an added bonus, it can also be dropped completely in casual speech. So yeah, sometimes you wind up getting sentences with no verbs.
Inconceivable!
A long, long time ago, in my first attempt to learn Japanese, I remember having read that ‘to be’ is frequently implied in Japanese. When you say 学生です, you’re technically just saying “student.” While we translate です as “to be,” it’s technically a term used to express a degree of formality.
Though I have since started learning Japanese from scratch and haven’t gotten that far, so I might be totally off with this.
Not from the desk of Eihiko. Eihiko's boss took his desk away from him.
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