In a previous post, I talked about the precision of Japanese language as seen through the myriad of classifiers (or counters) based on shape. Today, I’d like to go over some animal counters, since they differ according to both size and social ranking. There are primarily 3 counters for animals:
– hiki (匹) = for animals smaller than humans (cats, dogs, etc.)
– tou (頭) = for animals bigger than humans (horses, elephants, etc.)
– wa (羽) = for animals with wings (birds).
However, penguins can not fly, so beside wa they may be counted with hiki too. Ostriches can also be counted with tou due to their size. And for some reason, bunnies can be counted with wa too! (One explanation is because the ears of bunnies look like wings.)
But there is more: if the dog is a dog that is helping humans, such a service dog or a police dog, it is counted with tou which is normally used for big animals only. However this isn’t known by most Japanese people, so many use hiki and that’s totally ok (I do too!).
There are few more exceptions and variations, although I won’t mention them here because as you can see, it can get a bit too complicated. In fact, so most Japanese people don’t follow these particular rules either.
Next time, we will explore counters as they related to humans and demons, which have fascinating classifications, especially for the afterlife.
(Please note that the forms of some counters sometimes vary according to the number. They are listed in the Genki 1 book, on pages 380-381.)