Etymology of grammar-related terms in Japanese


I've been searching up words like '～の近く' (near), '～の裏側' (behind), '～より先'
(further away). Basically words related to the position of an object or thing.
The term I've been using is 前置詞 in Japanese, but I'm not sure this is right.

The thing is, even though I search up '前置詞', I'm always given a list of
websites of foreign language prepositions translated to Japanese. So my
question is, are grammar-related terms such as 前置詞, 動詞, 名詞, something that was
created because of the influx of foreign languages study in Japan or did these
terms already exist natively in the Japanese language?




You're right that these terms were added to describe linguistic phenomena in
general that are not necessarily in Japanese. It seems you were taking the
concept of an English and translating it to Japanese, but this does not work
because they are approximations of the same meaning without being the same
grammatically. So something like 前置詞 refers to a word (such as "in" or "to" or
"on") that comes at the start of a phrase to modify it. This doesn't exist in
Japanese. This also, as you seem to believe, does _not_ refer explicitly to
words that show "where something is." It can describe spatial relationships
(on the table) or temporal relationships (at 3:00) or reasons (for no reason
at all) or anything really. The point is that it comes before a phrase and
modifies it.

Things like に and で can help to approach the same meaning as a preposition in
English, but grammatically they are not the same. They are particles, and I
_think_ that they are, by definition, postpositional rather than
prepositional. The fact that they can express location is irrelevant.

