18035
I cannot recall this very clearly so I'm sorry if this is all not correct but
someone once told me that the word 友達{ともだち} has the plural marker たち "built-
in" and therefore you cannot say 友達たち about friends in a situation where you
could normally use ～たち.

Is that right? If it is, is there any other way to mark plurality for the word
友達 in situations where ～たち is used for other nouns?
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2014-07-29T09:24:32.420
18028
2014-07-29T15:48:41.603
2014-07-29T09:42:43.807
5041
5041
question
grammar plurals
Does 友達 have the plural marker たち "built-in"?
Your final question is different from the one in the title.

First, ～たち is **not** _built-in_. The noun 友 can appear on its own. See
[here](http://kotobank.jp/word/%E5%8F%8B?dic=daijisen&oid=13448100) for more
information. Therefore, the answer to your last question is **no**.

I want to mention though that ～たち, or suffixes such as ～ら, ～ども, etc. do not
mark the plural in the strict sense, but rather an **associative**. An
expression such as 犬たち does not simply mean something like English 'dogs', but
it means that multiple animals of the dog-persuasion are present **in
perception**. Compare the next two examples:

```

     (a)   公園では犬たちが遊んでいる。  
           'Dogs are playing in the park.'
     (b) * 犬たちは哺乳類だ。           
           'Dogs are mammals.'
    
```

Example (a) presupposes that the speaker is aware of the dogs in question.
They are unified as an association of animals in the perception of the
speaker.  
That, however, would not be appropriate for (b) because the sentence is more
general and makes a statement about a larger association that is not present
in perception. Hence in (b), the suffix should be absent.
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2014-07-29T09:46:46.993
18029
2014-07-29T09:46:46.993
5362
18028
answer
友達 is kind of an odd case - it's a word in the process of fossilisation. 友 on
its own is a valid word, albeit one with a distinctly archaic flavour. -たち was
then added to make a collective plural (as Thomas Gross says, not a true 'more
than one' plural, but instead a 'group described by this term' plural). Modern
speakers, though, would always use 友達 in all cases where 友 would have been
used in the past (excepting intentional archaisms), meaning that 友達 now also
has a singular meaning - the -たち part has fused onto the end of the word and
is no longer considered separable. Most people probably wouldn't even think of
this -たち here as the collective plural -たち.

'Built-in' is not a term I would use to describe this, though. It's not that
友達 was created as a single noun with -たち already a part, it's instead that the
phrase 「友だち」 was so much more common than 友 on its own that people started
hearing 友達 as a single unit rather than 友+たち.

However, it's not completely fossilised for all speakers, as some will still
mark ?友達たち as sounding odd. (Others are quite fine with it - it's totally
fossilised for them.) How do you go about making it plural, then? It's quite
simple - _the plural of 友達 is 友達._ You don't have to do anything with it for
it to sound quite natural. If you -really- feel the need to emphasise that
you're going with your friends as a group rather than just one, I suppose you
can take your chances and hope your listener is fine with 友達たち, but you can
easily get away with not bothering - 友達と一緒に行く is quite valid for both 'go with
a friend' and 'go with my friends (in general)' (though not for 'go with
(some) friends' or 'go with (a couple of) friends'!), and you can always clear
up any confusion later.
CC BY-SA 3.0
2014-07-29T15:48:41.603
18035
2014-07-29T15:48:41.603
3639
18028
answer