Monday, February 19, 2007

Dashes and things

Hi, when would you use just one dash?

Also, in Japanese class, my professor said something about adjectival (sp?) nouns. What the heck are those?

5 comments:

Pat said...

Do you mean one em-dash, as in the following? "He asked me why I went to the movie—something I couldn't justify when I had so little money."

Remember the first sentence in the Ferd Lewis column: "Defending Sony Open Hawaii champion..." Your professor may be talking about nouns used as adjectives. Lewis's sentence is an egregious example of what is called a noun string.

Takashi said...

I'm not very sure about this, but I think an adjectival noun in the Japanese context is a noun that can act like an adjective by placing the particle "na" before the noun it modifies.

Ex.
shizuka-na hito (a quiet person)

Again, I'm just guessing...

Pat said...

Good guess; thanks, Takashi.

Anonymous said...

Hmm, I meant just one dash, but then I remembered those are called en-dashes; and they are used between time periods and the like. So how does a dash look different from a hyphen.

Takashi, thank you!

Pat said...

An en-dash is longer than a hyphen. Your textbook talks about hyphens and en-dashes on pp. 150 to 152.

Takashi, could you please share your notes for last week's class with Jill? She was absent that day, so she missed our discussion of chapter 10.