# Tai Desu: I-Adjective Used in a Polite Speech



## Flaminius

notnotchris said:


> I learned that たい expressions need to be followed by です or だ. The grammatically correct plain form would be
> 
> 女の子は馬に乗りたいだ。


Chris, _-tai_ cannot be followed by _-da_ or _-dearu_ because it is an _i_-adjective (as evidenced by the negative 乗りたくない).

Like other _i_-adjectives _-tai_ can take _-desu_ but 乗りたいです is less acceptable than 乗りたがっている.  Moreover, a more general (and safer) formulation is 乗りたいそうだ.  Please find a related discussion here.  わたしは馬に乗りたい is the casual form.

While _i_-adjective plus _-desu_ is now a generally accepted construction, it still tends to be avoided in more formal use domains.  My favourite substitutions include (examples are given with utsukushii):
美しいことです
美しいものです
美しいと思います
美しいでしょう

Until recently, _-desu_ could not follow _i_-adjectives.  In order to make a polite sentence ending with an _i_-adjectives, _-shūgozaimasu_ was used.  The preference was still evident at least in writing as late as 1960s.  Here are the last words of an athlete who killed himself in 1968.


> 父上様、母上様、三日とろろ美味しゆうございました。干し柿、餅も美味しゆうございました (...) 幸吉は父母上様の側で暮らしとうございました」


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## cheshire

What do you say in English "形容動詞"? Are they included in -i adjectives?

きれいな
大きな
壮大な

These are 形容動詞. These adjectives are OK if you say きれいです、大きいです、壮大です。

Edit: I remembered, it's -na adjectives.


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## Matching Mole

I think these are usually referred to adjectival nouns, which sounds logical, since they are nouns. I suppose this is OK as long as it is clear we are talking of Japanese, as in English an adjectival noun is the other way round (an adjective acting as a noun, such as "_The rich_ are not always happy").

I wish the Japanese course books that I was taught with (or the teacher) had properly explain the grammatical difference between 形容詞 and 形容動詞 (I hope I have the terms right) at an earlier stage. In particular with reference to the issues clearly explained by Flaminius above. I had to discover these myself, some time after being taught about them. A book I looked at recently, _Japanese The Manga Way _(which is much better than it sounds), explained this - and other things that I had originally found mysterious - very well, I thought, so perhaps text books are improving.


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## cheshire

I read just a few textbooks, but I think they don't mention anything about 形容動詞, but just teach it as -na adjectives.
That I understand, as 形容動詞 is difficult to understand even for native speakers. We often confuse about whether きれいです is OK or not (which IS OK, because it's 形容動詞.).


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## cheshire

http://www.nhk.or.jp/a-room/kininaru/2004/11/1102.html

形容詞+です is now officially acceptable according to the link.


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## Aoyama

> _-tai_ cannot be followed by _-da_ or _-dearu_ because it is an _i_-adjective (as evidenced by the negative 乗りたくない).


That is very true, but then, *noritai-n da* can be heard, (as well as *shitakunai-n da*), _why_ ?


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## Matching Mole

This is intriguing. I understand the feeling that speakers sometimes feel that there should be a way to make such statements more polite (or simply less curt, which is perhaps a slightly different issue), but in that case why was しゆうございます not re-adopted? Perhaps too wordy for everyday use? Too formal compared to です, which I am taught is "semi-formal"? です seems very convenient, of course.

Incidentally, this feeling that existing forms are not adequate comes up in British English in respect to expressions of thanks. It is very common to hear "double thanks" in informal speech, a single thank you word is deemed to be not enough, so we have strange constructions such as "cheers thanks" and "thanks ta". Of course, I may be mistaken in relating the two practices and I don't want to get into discussing English here, but I wondered if they are related phenomena, or whether this particular topic is distinctly Japanese.


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## Captain Haddock

Aoyama said:


> That is very true, but then, *noritai-n da* can be heard, (as well as *shitakunai-n da*), _why_ ?



ん or の nominalizes the entire sentence before it, so the clause ending with the adjective たい is now a relative clause instead of the whole sentence. Then you can use だ as a predicate. But surely Aoyama knows all about nominalizing with n-da and koto-da.

チーズを食べたい。I want to eat cheese.
*チーズをたべたいだ。[makes no sense]

チーズを食べたいの… my wanting to eat cheese
チーズを食べたいのだ【んだ】It's that I want to eat cheese.

The -nda construction would probably be used in the way of an explanation or something like that.


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## notnotchris

Flaminius said:


> Chris, _-tai_ cannot be followed by _-da_ or _-dearu_ because it is an _i_-adjective (as evidenced by the negative 乗りたくない).
> 
> Like other _i_-adjectives _-tai_ can take _-desu_ but 乗りたいです is less acceptable than 乗りたがっている. Moreover, a more general (and safer) formulation is 乗りたいそうだ. Please find a related discussion here. わたしは馬に乗りたい is the casual form.
> 
> While _i_-adjective plus _-desu_ is now a generally accepted construction, it still tends to be avoided in more formal use domains. My favourite substitutions include (examples are given with utsukushii):
> 美しいことです
> 美しいものです
> 美しいと思います
> 美しいでしょう
> 
> Until recently, _-desu_ could not follow _i_-adjectives. In order to make a polite sentence ending with an _i_-adjectives, _-shūgozaimasu_ was used. The preference was still evident at least in writing as late as 1960s. Here are the last words of an athlete who killed himself in 1968.


 
Thanks for the correction Flaminius. That was actually what I learned from a Japanese grammar book. Just goes to show you can't believe everything you read.


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