Jumat, 18 Desember 2015

Particle Ga


The 「が」 identifier particle

Vocabulary

誰 【だれ】 - who学生 【がく・せい】 - student私 【わたし】 - me; myself; IOk, so we can make a topic using the 「は」 and 「も」 particle. But what if we don’t know what the topic is? What if I wanted to ask, “Who is the student?” What I need is some kind of identifier because I don't know who the student is. If I use the topic particle, the question would become, “Is who the student?” and that doesn't make any sense because "who" is not an actual person.This is where the 「が」 particle comes into play. It is also referred to as the subject particle but I hate that name since "subject" means something completely different in English grammar. Instead, I call it the identifier particle because the particle indicates that the speaker wants to identify something unspecified.

Example 1

ボブ:誰が学生?Bob: Who is the one that is student?アリス:ジョンが学生。Alice: John is the one who is student.Bob wants to identify who among all the possible candidates is a student. Alice responds that John is the one. Notice, Alice could also have answered with the topic particle to indicate that, speaking of John, she knows that he is a student (maybe not the student). You can see the difference in the next example.

Example 2

誰が学生?Who is the one that is student?学生は誰?(The) student is who?The first sentence seeks to identify a specific person for "student" while the second sentence is simply talking about the student. You cannot replace 「が」 with 「は」 in the first sentence because "who" would become the topic and the question would become, "Is who a student?"The two particles 「は」 and 「が」 may seem very similar only because it is impossible to translate them directly into English. For example, the two sentences below have the same English translation.*

Example 3

私は学生。I (am) student.私が学生。I (am) student.However, they only seem similar because English cannot express information about the context as succinctly as Japanese sometimes can. In the first sentence, since 「私」 is the topic, the sentence means, "Speaking about me, I am a student".However, the second sentence is specifying who the 「学生」 is. If we want to know who the student is, the 「が」 particle tells us it's 「私」. You can also think about the 「が」 particle as always answering a silent question. The second sentence might be answering a question, "Who is the student?" I often translate the topic particle as "as for; about" and the identifier particle as "the one; the thing" to illustrate the difference.私は学生。As for me, (I am) student.私が学生。I (am) the one (that is) student.The 「は」 and 「が」 particles are actually quite different if you think of it the right way. The 「が」 particle identifies a specific property of something while the 「は」 particle is used only to bring up a new topic of conversation. This is why, in longer sentences, it is common to separate the topic with commas to remove ambiguity about which part of the sentence the topic applies to.*Well technically, it's the most likely translation given the lack of context.