This piece arose from an answer to a question on the nominalizing no and perhaps explains this particular aspect a little more clearly than in the video The Japanese nominalizing no particle.

Japanese school textbooks for Japanese children explain the nominalizing no as being short for “no mono” and I think that is pretty accurate in describing how it works.

To put it another way, no in “aoi no” meaning “the blue one” is indeed the no that is roughly equivalent to “mono” or “koto”. And when we want to place a possessive no before this no (they are closely related as I show in the nominalizing no video) we don’t double the no, but let one stand for both.

So if we want to say “Sakura’s one” we don’t say “sakura no no”, we just say “sakura no”, as in “sakura no ga suki da” (I like Sakura’s one).

We do something very similar in English. For example, we may say

“Sakura’s is red, Mary’s is blue”

which would exactly correspond to

“Sakura no ga akai , Mearii no ga aoi”

rather than

“Sakura’s one is red and Mary’s one is blue”

which, literally rendered, would be

X “Sakura no no ga akai, Mearii no no ga aoi”

The cross is to show that this sentence is not correct Japanese.

In English we can conflate the ‘s and the one but in Japanese we must conflate the no that is ‘s and the no that is one.

Originally published on Cure Dolly’s Patreon on Apr 4, 2018