Tag Archives: chinese history

This page was rough. I’m still very early stages in learning Japanese and there’s not nearly so much to hang onto here as there was on the first page. (Learning to introduce yourself is one of the few things you learn when you first start learning a language, so I definitely got lucky last time.) I found that 的(teki) has a fascinating history. The meaning of indicating possession matches the Chinese 的(de), but it’s thought that the sound actually was adopted from the English adjective ending “-tic” as in “spastic” or “plastic” during the Meiji Era (late 1800s – early 1900s).