grammatical number - Should nouns borrowed from Japanese be pluralized?


As someone who has watched a lot of subtitled Japanese animation, it seems odd to hear a word such as ninja (used in the plural) in the dialogue and see it transliterated as ninjas.


It somehow seems better to me to treat ninja just like antelope, bison, buffalo, caribou, deer, elk, fish, grouse, quail, reindeer, sheep, swine, etc., which are both singular and plural.



Answer



Would you also insist that Japanese speakers pluralize English words when used in the plural?


Once a word has been borrowed into a language, it adheres to the grammar for normal words in that language. We don't borrow Japanese grammar, just words, so there is no need to use a zero plural with borrowed Japanese words.


It is true there is a small set of animal nouns in English that have a zero plural, but they are not borrowed and are a special case.


This is borne out by the results in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, which has 68 incidences of "ninjas". Of the 496 incidences of "ninja", there are a handful of uses of "ninja" as a zero plural, as OP suggests, from the script for the 2003 film The Last Samurai, but the vast majority are singular (or attributive) usage. So it does appear that zero-plural "ninja" is used, albeit uncommonly so.


So yes, ninja meaning ninjas is a usage that gets some use, but regular pluralized ninjas is more common, and perfectly grammatical.


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