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I'm not fully sure the linguistic terms yet, I believe it's a noun phrase. Is there a way to form such expressions in Japanese with a single noun phrase?

  • This heart of mine
  • That son of yours
  • These cats of hers
  • Those trash of his

I tried Google Translate and it produced something like「私のこの心」, and that looked weird to me. Is it possible, and if not what's the closest alternatives?

奇興好
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    [Related](https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/85/does-japanese-have-determiners?r=SearchResults) – sbkgs4686 Apr 22 '20 at 07:16
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    You first need to explain the difference in nuance between, for example, "that son of yours" and "your son". Without that information you cannot hope to find a Japanese phrase with the same nuance. Personally I find examples 2 to 4 have a derogatory tone, but I'm not so sure that your first example is the same. – user3856370 Apr 22 '20 at 13:26
  • To be honest, I'm more concerned with the grammatical feasibility of it, rather than the nuance of my example sentence. That is checking if it's possible to fill the gap in this simple sentence comparisons between [Indonesian, Japanese, and English](https://pastebin.com/AapPJUhM). – 奇興好 Apr 22 '20 at 23:45

2 Answers2

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私のこの心

Yes, that's it.

Why it makes you feel strange is perhaps because you speak English. Please take a look at the post @sbkgs4686 has cited for details, but the point is that English (as well as many West European languages) has a word class determiner that you can use only once in each phrase. "That", "the", "a", "any", "my", "their" are its typical members so that you can't use any two or more of them at the same time. As a result, you are forced to make ones like "a friend of mine" or "these cats of hers" instead of something like "*a my friend" or "*these her cats".

Japanese is free from all such things, so you just put:

あなたのその息子 "your that son": that son of yours
彼女のこの猫たち "her these cats": these cats of hers

For "those trash of his" I can think of multiple situations which I don't think literal translation works very well anyways. What also should be noted is that the default position of この／その／あの is after possessive, before ordinary adjectives if any: 私のこのかわいい猫たち.

Oh, by the way, pronouns are just nouns in Japanese, that means:

美しい日本の私 *beautiful Japan's me → "Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself"

broccoli facemask
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  • Thanks, but does the order matters weather it's 私のこの心 or この私の心? My native language is actually Indonesian, and I guess English did influence my thinking in believing that was weird. Can it fill the gaps--The ones marked with「分からない」--in this [comparison](https://pastebin.com/AapPJUhM) well enough? – 奇興好 Apr 22 '20 at 23:53
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    @奇興好 この modifies 心 in the former ("this heart of mine"), while it modifies 私 in the latter ("the heart of this guy here"). It's perfectly fine to say この私 in Japanese (see [this](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/q/16220/5010)). – naruto Apr 23 '20 at 00:59
  • @奇興好 Yes, though in the case of "this small cat of mine" the determinative no longer comes next to the noun: 僕のこの小さな猫. – broccoli facemask Apr 23 '20 at 01:37
  • So, is there any difference in nuance between 私のX and 私のこのX? Why would you choose the latter option? Is it merely "this X that also belongs to me" or does it have some deeper nuance, like the English equivalent? – user3856370 Apr 24 '20 at 07:57
  • @user3856370 Sometimes it's just an emphasis. Other times the demonstrative is meaningful: 私のこのGalaxyは古いが、あなたのそのiPhoneは新しい. Imagine two gadget lovers' dialogue when having a phone in each hand. But isn't it same in English too? – broccoli facemask Apr 24 '20 at 08:18
  • @broccolifacemask-cloth As you say, it can be the same in English. But used wrongly it could also be offensive. In the OP's two examples "That son of yours" and "That cat of yours", would strongly suggest that the speaker has a problem with the son/cat and is not happy about something e.g. 'that cat of yours has dug up my bean plant again' (there may be contexts where that isn't true, but it's what immediately springs to mind). I'm guessing that nuance doesn't exist in Japanese? – user3856370 Apr 24 '20 at 08:52
  • @user3856370 Thank you for the input. I can safely say it doesn't. あなたのその息子 surely has a quite of chance being offensive, but it rather due to あなた and the lack of inter-personal buffers, not the default implication of the construction. Is their any analysis about the nuance of (demonstrative)+(possessive) that I can read? – broccoli facemask Apr 24 '20 at 14:45
  • @broccolifacemask-cloth Sorry, I'm no linguist. I'm just speaking from my personal experience as a native speaker. Might be worth a question on English Language Stack Exchange if your interested. I'd be interested to see what answers you get. – user3856370 Apr 24 '20 at 14:48
  • @user3856370 https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/245430/does-demonstrative-and-possessive-pronoun-make-it-offensive どうぞ – broccoli facemask Apr 24 '20 at 15:34
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I'm not sure such kind of phrasing is used in Japanese, but in songs I've seen many times "このX" to implicitly refer to "my X", e.g. この胸, この手 and so on.

Igor Skochinsky
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