Talk:綺麗

Noun?

I don't know of any Japanese dictionary that has 奇麗/綺麗 as a noun. It's either a な-adjective (see 綺麗な) or, if you add a に to it, it's an adverb (see 綺麗に). But it doesn't exist as a noun. Also, in the dictionaries I have handy, 奇麗 seems to be the preferred/emphasized form; not 綺麗. Though they seem to be interchangeable. Jun-Dai 22:11, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

"Na adjectives" are considered nouns by lots of people. (If you can say "X datta" as a single, complete sentence with the meaning of "It was X", then it's a noun. Kirei datta. Neko datta. Kawakatta. This isn't the only way of analyzing Japanese grammar, of course, but it's one of the common ones.) 奇 is preferred because it's a joyo kanji. In non-joyo-compliant contexts, 綺 is pretty common. Franzeska 17:05, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

(chiming in a bit later :) )

@Jun-Dai: The entry has since been restructured to remove the "noun" part of speech.

For Wiktionary purposes, we generally hew to the precept that a given 形容動詞 (keiyō dōshi, “-na adjective”, literally “adjectival verb”) is an adjective, not a noun -- unless it can also be used as a noun, specifically as the patient or agent of a verb. Predicative usage such as Franzeska describes above (things like "X datta") is insufficient to qualify as a noun.

Monolingual Japanese references usually indicate whether a given keiyō dōshi or -na adjective can also be used as a noun. One example is 永遠 (eien), as we see in the Daijisen entry here at Kotobank, where the POS at the start of the entry is indicated as ［名・形動］, i.e. [noun / -na adjective]. By contrast, 綺麗 (kirei) is shown in that entry as only ［形動］ or [-na adjective] -- not as a ［名］ or [noun].

As examples, we can say things like 永遠は... (eien wa...), where eien is the topic or subject of a sentence, as the noun eternity. We cannot grammatically say things like 綺麗は... (kirei wa...), outside of uncommon and very specific constructions, because kirei is not a noun and cannot be used as the topic or subject of a sentence (nor as the object). A rough analog might be to say "Eternity is..." for the former, and "Pretty is..." for the latter.

HTH! ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 21:07, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

FYI

Japanese 綺麗/きれい (pretty, pure, beautiful) has opposite meaning and does not relate with Thai ขี้เหร่ (ugly, unattractive); they are just pronounced similar by accident. --Octahedron80 (talk) 05:42, 7 September 2019 (UTC)