アラビア語と日本語における名詞修飾節の対照 : 修飾節と被修飾名詞の関連性の対比という観点から

In Egyptian universities such as Cairo University and Ain Shams University, Japanese departments use textbooks that offer an English explanation, glossary, and examples. However, the students’ first language is Arabic. Also, the English expressions are not necessarily equivalent to Arabic ones. Thus, students could face some confusion especially during translation lectures in which they are required to directly translate Arabic to Japanese and vice versa. To enhance the current situation, it is necessary to study the relationship between different expressions in Arabic and Japanese, while also considering the influence of the textbooks’ English explanation. In this paper, I chose noun modification out of different expressions that could cause such confusion. Noun modification includes different grammatical features the students learn such as a variety of particles and verb conjunctions. It is also the step in which students learn to form longer sentences and how to add a clause into sentences. In other words, it is a necessary expression to form more elaborate sentences and an advanced discourse. Many possible comparison points can be utilized to analyze the similarities and differences of noun modification in Arabic and Japanese. For example, structure, types of meaning implemented in the clause, independence of the clause, usage of pronouns in the clause, etc could all be used in the comparison. In this paper, I chose to compare a more basic aspect which is the relationship between the modified noun and the modification clause. The result of this comparison shows that five facts need to be clearly explained to the students so that they get a better grasp of this grammatical feature. For example, it is essential to understand types of Japanese noun modification in order to decide which expression it can be converted to when writing Arabic. During this process, students should also gather necessary information such as gender and number through Japanese context so that they could use the appropriate Arabic wording. When converting Arabic to Japanese, students are required to expand the grammatical structure to extract the modified noun if relative pronouns such as “man” or “maa” are used.