涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱: Week 3 Discussion

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Chapter 1 (3/3)

Suzumiya

Start Date: July 6th
Previous Thread: Week2
Next Thread: Week 4

Week 3 Reading: Chapter 1 (3/3)
Until p.46 (end of chapter)

Word lists - Learn the vocabulary for 涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱!

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Discussion Rules

  • Please use spoiler tags for major events in the current chapter(s) and any content in future chapters.
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AAAAAAND this week isn’t starting well.

Spoilery spoil

「付き合う男全部振ったって本当か?」
「なんであんたにそんなこと言わなくちゃいけないのよ」

Indeed. What the frick キョン.

まったく、無表情でいないときは怒った顔ばっかりだな。

Well gee I sure wonder why this is a mystery for eons to come it can’t possibly have anything to do with your attitude.

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Studying and reviewing stuff for the JLPT Sunday has kind of taken priority this week. I’ll catch up once it’s over. :star:

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Maybe I’m just a rude American, but is that really so bad? D :

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What caught my attention was a bit further down the dialogue, when he thinks:

虫でも見るような目つきを前にして重大な----少なくとも本人にとっては----打ち明けごとをする気になれなかっただろう男の気分をトレースしながら一応俺は同意しておいた。

I mean, it’s an attributive だろう!

Grammatical digression

だろう normally can’t directly modify a noun, but it is tolerated in writing, though usually in more literary forms. Maybe I would have expected なれなかったろう instead? :thinking: Not sure it’d be “more literary” though, but seeing as it appeared last week in speech, it wouldn’t have been surprising.

If I’m allowed to digress further, IMHO, this is the kind of stuff that tends to favour a “inflections as conjugations” instead of “stem + auxiliary” view.

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I mean Haruhi established herself as a pretty straight-forward, no fuffin around kinda person with her introduction.
Asking a straight-forward person a straight-forward question doesn’t seem that bad to me. shrug

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@QuackingShoe @Gyoshi

Too lazy to blur individual parts

It could be just me, I guess. But my gut reaction is exactly the same as her: “why do I have to tell you that?”. It seems (to me) like a very weird topic of conversation for small talks. I guess it matters less here since she wasn’t really emotionally invested in the relationships, but he couldn’t know that (for sure) beforehand.
I do not know of a better way to bring up the topic in the current setting, but then again, maybe he should not.

Thinking harder about it, it might be because it sounds like an indirect accusation (even if it was neither intended by Kyon or the author), but I do not want this thread to move toward that discussion; I’m just trying to explain why I feel that way about the topic.

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Summary

Well, whenever anyone asks her something innocuous, she ignores them. Whenever he asks her extremely pointed questions about her own actions, she indulges - it seems to be the only thing non-supernatural she feels worth talking about. Given that that pattern is already established, I don’t see an issue.
Incidentally, I think that if someone has had a series of relationships, none lasting longer than a week, you may infer that they weren’t very emotionally invested ^^;

In other news I can’t find my book what the heck

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I found my book! Time to knuckle down!

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Where was it?

Languishing under junk at the SO’s house. I’ve been trying to take it with me most places in case someone asks a question, but whoops

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I’m done with this week’s reading. Overall, I liked it better; I don’t know precisely why… I’m guessing just because Haruhi started talking a bit more so it’s not only the narrator’s rambling endlessly about what he thinks of her…

Anyway, onto the main topic… interesting grammar! Maybe I should create a club for unusual grammar seekers. :no_mouth: Overall, though, no big linguistic enquiries for me to ponder this week, which means reading was faster and more pleasant.

(Should I spoiler the following points? It’s not like I’m talking about the events of the story or anything… but if you want me to, let me know.)

いつからハルヒが傍目から見るとトチ狂っているとしか思えないことをやっていたのか知らんけど、待てど暮らせど何も現れず、業を煮やしては奇怪な儀式を行ってもナシのツブテ、そりゃいつも全世界を呪っているような顔にもなる……わけないか。
Even though it’s considered an idiom now, it’s actually not corrupted and totally parsable as two (classical) -edo forms “even though”, lit. “even though they wait, even though they spend time”.

ハルヒはお百度参りを決意した呪い女のようなワニ目で中空を眺め、北風のようなため息をついた。
How do you interpret 呪い女? Looks like a made-up compound, so I’d say “evil witch” or something, as in some woman who puts bad curses on people; if it were “cursed woman”, instead, it would be 呪われた女, I guess?

言うなれば、それを出来ない人間が、発明やら発見やらをして文明を発達させてきたんだ
Another idiom, another classical grammar point. 言うなれば is a directly nominalised verb 言う (would be 言うの in standard modern Japanese—classical did not require nominalisers) + なれば, the old provisional form of the old copula なり, which also gave us なら(ば). As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, the -eba form had a core meaning of “as” or “since”, so “since it is that I (shall) speak / since I am to speak” > “so to speak”. Also the following 凡人たる我々は; talk about grandiose speech!

凡人たる我々は、人生を凡庸に過ごすのが一番であってだな。身分不相応な冒険心なんか出さないほうが、
This であってだな seems to be another occurrence of an inserted pragmatic clause “isn’t it?” or “right?” after a gerund (であって). This splits the long utterance, and then the actual sentence continues after the period.

俺は目の前に刻の涙を見た
This 刻の涙を見る seems to be a Gundam meme, with a vague meaning of “to experience the suffering/hardship that comes with great change”, probably in reference to the emergence of Newtypes in the Universal Century canon. Unfortunately, my knowledge of UC is pretty lacking, so if somebody knows more…

もし笑顔に温度が付帯しているなら、熱帯雨林のど真ん中くらいの気温になっているだろう。
This ど真ん中 appears to be a doubly emphasised 中, with both ど- and 真(ん).

痛む後頭部がよからぬ予感を告げていた。
Yet another idiom that transparently borrows from the classical. よく+ある+ぬ, essentially just a fancy way to say “not good”. EDIT: Wait, is that even considered classical? :thinking:

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You should read/watch some westernized fantasy. Any knight character will give you these all day long :wink:

Well… isn’t this the wrong genre for that, though? :thinking:

I guess? I see/hear this stuff all the time though.

Interesting; by “this stuff” do you mean old-form adjectives with the -kar- / -ker- ending or just the -nu form?

Both.

I don’t think people always limit themselves to modern Japanese, or their own dialect, as much as one might think.
But よからぬ in particular has it’s own dictionary entry, I suppose because it’s used especially often.

Yeah, that’s probably true; it’s not like “dialect” is absolute anyway… many variations. Plus, as was talked about in the week 1 thread, these superficial literary forms are easy to borrow so people freely mix them in when they want to sound old or formal or whatever… in fact, I’m not even sure that -karazu would be considered classical, now that you mention it.

Well, we’ll see; if those become too common as I read further, I might just not bother remarking anything about them anymore. :man_shrugging:

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Thank you! I was asking a native speaker about it, but they just said that it’s a set phrase and I couldn’t get an answer about the grammar. It’s also not in my grammar dictionary (which makes sense since it’s not modern grammar).
I could have looked up online, but forgot.

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You have questions? :scream:

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