Talk:詞

Japanese - verb?

In [books.google.de/books?id=rsMUAAAAIAAJ] (p.43; should be from a Time before ~1900) it's written that Kotoba (詞) means Verb (latin Verbum), though it's literally Word (latin Verbum). So, is or was Verb a meaning of Kotoba? [The japanese Character's Form here looks slighty different the one in the Book, but that might just be a Simplification at Computers.] — This unsigned comment was added by 80.133.111.36 (talk) at 16:00, 2015 March 2‎ (UTC).

• From my sources, I only see 詞 (kotoba) used to mean word, language, and speech. There have been various grammatical approaches to Japanese over the years, and each has often used different terms to describe the different grammatical roles, so it's entirely possible that 詞 (kotoba) was used as a grammatical term for verb at some point in some particular grammar.

I tried to find out when the linked book was written. I cannot see any bibliographical detail about this book beyond the title of Japanische Sprachlehre. The archaic spelling, with a prevalence of Fs and many cases of au where modern Japanese uses ō, leads me to think that this German text is describing Japanese from at least before the early-20th-century spelling reforms in Japan, possibly earlier. As such, differences in Japanese grammatical terminology are not at all surprising.

I do note that the text on page 43, which first mentions 詞 (kotoba), also includes a different Japanese term in parentheses at the end of the paragraph: “Fataraki kotobá” (text here, scroll down to the section for page 43). This longer term is a known word for verb (more generally referring also to any conjugating or declining word), 働き詞 (hataraki kotoba, literally “working / functioning word”), and this was replaced by the modern Japanese word 動詞 (dōshi, “verb”, literally “moving / movement word”).

Given the parenthetical comment on page 43, I wonder either if the authors of this German book might not have gotten confused at one point, and thought that kotoba was an acceptable abbreviation of hataraki kotoba, or if the Japanese grammatical tradition prevalent at the time sometimes used kotoba as shorthand for hataraki kotoba.

Ultimately, without more detail, I think it would be a mistake at this time to add verb as a sense of 詞 (kotoba). ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 18:36, 2 March 2015 (UTC)