Japanese Grammar in EBNF notation
This is awesome!  I&#x27;ve always wanted to try this.  The only real complaint I have is that &quot;da&quot; is not actually a copula in the strictest sense.  It&#x27;s a contraction of &quot;de aru&quot;.  Similarly &quot;na&quot; is not a modifier.  It&#x27;s a contraction of &quot;ni aru&quot;.  &quot;aru&quot; is the verb which is the closest you get to a copula in Japanese - it means &quot;it exists&quot; for non-animate noun-phrases.<p>So if you say &quot;sakana da&quot;, it does mean &quot;It is fish&quot;, but so does just &quot;sakana&quot;.  The copula is implied.  The &quot;da&quot; is completely optional and is actually only added for emphasis -- the literal translation is kind of like &quot;That it is fish exists&quot;.  In literary Japanese you would say &quot;sakana de aru&quot;, &quot;de&quot; being the particle that links a verb the the means with which the verb is executed.  For example &quot;basu de iku&quot; means &quot;will go by bus&quot; -- bus is the means by which we will go.  In &quot;sakana de aru&quot; or &quot;sakana da&quot; we are basically saying that &quot;fish&quot; is the means of its existence.<p>The &quot;na&quot; modifier is also interesting.  It is really &quot;ni aru&quot; where &quot;ni&quot; is essentially the &quot;direction&quot; in which something exists.  &quot;Something like a fish&quot; would be &quot;sakana no you&quot;.  If you want to say &quot;It is a fragrance something like a fish&quot; you could say &quot;sakana no you na kaori&quot;.  Although I&#x27;m not aware of any modern Japanese that would express it like this, this is equivalent to &quot;sakana no you ni aru kaori&quot; -- &quot;It is a fragrance that exists in the direction like a fish&quot;.  Hopefully you can understand.<p>The interesting part of this is that adding &quot;ni aru&quot; to the end of a noun phrase just turns it into a verb phrase.  And the even more interesting bit is that the only thing that can modify a noun phrase is a verb phrase.<p>But, you may have heard of &quot;i-adjectives&quot; -- these are adjectives that end in i.  In actuality, these are not adjectives!  They are verb phrases!  So the word &quot;cute&quot; is &quot;kawaii&quot;.  However, the actual word is &quot;kawai&quot; and the <i>inflection</i> is &quot;i&quot;.  That&#x27;s why when you want to say &quot;not cute&quot; it becomes &quot;kawaiku nai&quot; -- the &quot;i&quot; turns into &quot;ku&quot; because you are inflecting a verb.<p>This in turn is why you modify nouns directly with &quot;i-adjectives&quot;.  &quot;kawai sakana&quot;, or &quot;cute fish&quot;.  Other adjectives are actually noun phrases in Japanese.  &quot;yumei na sakana&quot; or &quot;famous fish&quot;.  This is, again, exactly the same as &quot;yumei ni aru sakana&quot; -- &quot;The fish exists in the direction of fame&quot;.<p>So the rules are even simpler than presented in this blog post.<p>By the way, for anyone trying to learn Japanese and who wants to go beyond phrase-book level: learn plain form first and polite form later (if ever).  Japanese makes absolutely no sense if you learn polite form first.  It&#x27;s incredibly logical (even the polite form extensions) if you start with plain form.