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Ok, so there seems to be some controversy over whether we can really say that there are 'の-adjectives', or whether we simply use a noun in an "attributive" way (a term which I don't actually really understand). But it's clear that there's something interesting going on here, a deviation from the "default" understanding of の (as marking the genitive case), and I'd like some clarification.

Let's look at what seems to be for whatever the classical example:

○　「永遠の愛」 "eternal love"

It's clear that we can't just apply the pattern "X の Y ⇔ Y of X" here*. But what is really going on? How do we know that the usual pattern doesn't apply here - is it contextual? A matter of set-phrasing? Is it because 永遠, being abstract, would need to be reified to be used in the normal way?

* It's worth noting that the pattern doesn't even hold in English here, which does seem to be a special case.

"love of eternity" - a strange thing to talk about, but in English, reification is implicit so this works just as well as "love of gold".

But what is more strange is that with "love" in particular, this doesn't have the normal genitive-case meaning - an English speaker parses "love of gold" not as the love which is expressed by gold, but love such that gold is the thing that is loved. Similarly for "eternity", following the same role.

And it doesn't even work the same way with similar words... * "desire/lust of gold" - should be "desire/lust for gold". But regardless, a love which is eternal is not the same thing as a love which is expressed by (belongs to, really; but in what other sense can love be possessed than by expressing it?) eternity-seen-as-an-entity, which would be the default interpretation of the pattern.

What happens in Japanese with that example? 「金の愛」 - grammatical? How would it be interpreted? How about with explicit reification (「金のことの愛」・「金のものの愛」）？

And how literal is it to translate 「永遠の」 as "eternal"? Can we describe what's going on here more pedantically? What determines our ability to use a noun this way with の?

And am I getting too philosophical? :)

Karl Knechtel
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    Don't expect a one-to-one correlation between languages. Languages are different. –  Aug 21 '11 at 00:03
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    Of course not; the point is to understand the difference more properly. – Karl Knechtel Aug 21 '11 at 00:21
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    According to dictionaries, the English preposition "of" has [17 different meanings](http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/of) and the Japanese case particle "の" has [20 (=14+1+1+1+3) differnt meanings](http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/leaf/jn2/171157/m0u/%E3%81%AE/). If you were taught the 20 meanings of "の" individually, would you be satisfied? – Gradius Jul 30 '12 at 22:47
  • Short answer: の works kind of the same way as 的 in Chinese. – sigs Oct 08 '14 at 06:26
  • It seems to me that "eternity's love" would be a perfectly idiomatic, if unduly poetic or old-fashioned, way of saying "eternal love" in English. – Obie 2.0 Apr 24 '19 at 12:48
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    There is such thing in English as "attributive nouns", nouns that modify the nouns following them as if they were adjectives (look for "noun adjunct" on Wikipedia). "First-class flight", "communications system", etc. Grammatically there's no point to distinguish these nouns from adjectives in English because modern English grammar has no inflection for adjectives (adjectives never change form), but in languages like Japanese, or even English's close relatives like German, the grammatical difference must be taken note of. – Vun-Hugh Vaw Dec 25 '21 at 05:22
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    "Attributive" means it gives "attributes", quality, character, what have you, although strictly speaking an attributive adjective or noun must be close to the noun it modifies without being separated by a verb like "to be", in which case the adjective or noun is called "predicative". "Red" in "a red balloon" is attributive, but "red" in "the balloon is red" is predicative. – Vun-Hugh Vaw Dec 25 '21 at 05:26

1 Answers1

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As I understand it, the term “no-adjective” simply means “nouns which are typically translated to adjectives in English and other languages.” If we treat Japanese as a language in its own right, distinguishing them from nouns as different parts-of-speech is completely artificial.

The particle の makes a modifier of a noun. The exact relationship between the modifier and the modified noun can be almost anything; Daijisen lists fourteen relationships such as ownership, belonging, location of existence, location of action, time, and so on, and one of them is “attribute and condition.”

[瀕死]{ひんし}の[重傷]{じゅうしょう} a life-threatening injury
[縦]{たて}じまのシャツ a shirt with vertical stripes

(The examples are from Daijisen, the English translation of the first example is by FumbleFingers on english.stackexchange.com, and the translation of the second example is by me.)

The の in 永遠の愛 is the same thing. The noun [永遠]{えいえん} (eternity) is turned to a modifier 永遠の, and it describes an attribute of the love.

Chocolate
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Tsuyoshi Ito
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  • How do we figure out which relationship is associated with a given noun? – Karl Knechtel Aug 20 '11 at 23:39
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    @Karl: Because の does not specify the exact relationship, we figure out the relationship from the meaning and the context. For example, 校長の話 can be both “story _by_ the principal” or “story _about_ the principal” depending on the context. – Tsuyoshi Ito Aug 20 '11 at 23:43
  • \*sigh\* So I have to figure it out again for each case? Ok, and how about the `金` examples? – Karl Knechtel Aug 21 '11 at 09:00
  • @Karl: I would translate “love of gold” to 金に対する愛 or 金を愛すること. None of 金の愛, 金のことの愛, and 金のものの愛 is understandable. – Tsuyoshi Ito Aug 21 '11 at 11:35
  • 金を愛すること makes sense (I can't understand how 対 is being used here), but that doesn't really leave me any closer to understanding how this works in general. :( – Karl Knechtel Aug 21 '11 at 18:34
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    @Karl: I am not a language teacher and am just answering your question. At least these examples show that “XのY ⇔ Y of X” is not a good correspondence in either direction. – Tsuyoshi Ito Aug 21 '11 at 18:37
  • I change the translation of 瀕死の重傷 on the basis of the [answer by FumbleFingers](http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/38783/is-it-correct-to-say-he-got-a-fatal-injury-in-the-accident-when-there-is-a-poss/38785#38785) to my question on english.stackexchange.com. – Tsuyoshi Ito Aug 22 '11 at 11:09
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    @Karl Knetchel: "no" is ambiguous, there's nothing you can do about it. So is "of" in English: "the love of a mother" could mean either that "a child loves his mother" or that "a mother loves her child". – Axioplase Aug 23 '11 at 02:02
  • @Karl - 対 has a general meaning of facing something, and is used to indicate a relationship between two things: adversary, partner, comparison, et alia. 一対一, one-on-one; メッツ対ヤンキース, Mets vs. Yankees; 対NATO同盟, an alliance with NATO. に対する just specifies that there's a relationship going on between two things: gold, and someone who loves it. In other words, somebody's love *toward* (that's the "facing" sense) gold. I hope that makes some kind of sense. – rdb Aug 23 '11 at 09:11
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    @Karl Languages were not defined by rules. This is important. We will use an expression if it works in a certain context. Although languages are ambitious by nature, native speakers know commonly used patterns, for example, we never say "金の愛". This is the same as all languages including English. You probably counldn't figure out the meanings of fireball, firearm, firewall and fireball if you didn't know their meanings. – Gradius Jul 30 '12 at 22:21