Talk:能

This character originally has no meaning of possessive.

I have it on good authority that it does. If not, can you tell me which kanji was/were used for the possessive "no" before hiragana was standardized for the use of particles and okurigana? — Hippietrail 15:27, 3 Jul 2004 (UTC)

之/乃 are used for possessive "の". Japanese is the language that distinguish long and short vowel. 能 is always long, possessive "の" is always short.

I am open to being wrong if it's discussed. I don't know very much about Japanese after all. Here is part of a reply I received today, before I started posting changes to Wiktionary, in answer to a question of mine, on the topic of Korean and Japanese particles before Hangul and Hiragana:

"I should point out, though, that some spellings were much more common in Japanese than others: e.g., no was normally 能, though other spellings existed (乃廼笶篦)." (Marc Miyake www.amritas.com)

I actually expected 之 to be the answer but since he has a phd in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese linguistics, I've just taken his word for it. I wasn't worried by the vowel length since I'm used to kanji having several different readings anyway. — Hippietrail 16:09, 3 Jul 2004 (UTC)

• @Hippietrail -- this character was one of the several 万葉仮名 (man'yōgana) that was used to spell no. See the Wikipedia article for more, at man'yōgana.

That said, 万葉仮名 used this way were purely phonetic and had no meaning component, so the 能 character did not itself embody any meaning of possession. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 23:48, 21 July 2017 (UTC)

"To can"

Is "to can" proper grammar? It sounds quite strange, as opposed to just the bare "can". Audacity (talk) 04:32, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

Fixed. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 04:41, 19 January 2015 (UTC)