Counters in Japanese, Contrasted with their English Translations

Abstract

There are expressions in any language which refer to a certain quantity or number of certain things, ideas, human beings, etc. Expressions of this kind are studied in this paper, for instance 'five pairs of shoes', 'ten books', 'three children', 'eleven tsubos' (a Japanese measurement), ’many birds'. The author collected the Japanese phrases or sentences from Japanese newspapers as well as from oral communication with native speakers of the Japanese language.

According to the author's classification, the Japanese counters fall into three groups. These three groups are different from one another, both on account of the differences in the semantic peculiarities of the nouns to which the counters refer, and from the viewpoint of a contrastive study of the English translations. The results of this contrastive study are also presented in this paper.