かがみの孤城 Week 4

Japanese Language Reading
#21

I think you got the meaning of the full sentence correct and that that is sort of what it is. Phrased a bit differently you get ‘secure it just to secure it’ which might make a bit more sense. (I read it as ‘secure it just to keep it safe’ in my head, I think).

The dictionary of basic grammar suggests to read だけ after an infinitive verb as ‘that’s all’, so you could read 確保するだけ as ‘to secure it, that’s all’ and the 確保して is what they have to do to make that possible (secure it in the first place).

Edit: what might be wrong with ‘securing only the securing’ is that you are then treating the first ‘securing’ as the object of the second one, but there is no を in the Japanese (it would then have to be だけを, I think). I think the object of both ‘securing’ verbs is the key.

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#22

だけ can also mean “as much as” in the sense of “to the greatest extent possible” 【JLPT N３】文法・例文：〜だけ | 日本語NET
which may possibly be the intended meaning here?
(most prominent example is できるだけ - as much as possible)

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#23

I also think this is the meaning. It’s similar to the grammar point:

Verb だけ/ほど (same) conditional verb, statement
(The more you verb, the more you statement),
Which I’ve always thought of as “to the extent that you can verb, when you verb, you statement.”

Okay, maybe that wasn’t helpful. But I interpreted
確保するだけ確保してas “be as sure as possible that…”

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#24

Yes, you two are probably right. In order for my explanation to work there would probably have to be another particle after だけ or a ために in there somewhere.

Edit: indeed, by coincidence I just found the following phrase in ヨコハマ買い出し紀行 which is probably the correct grammar for what I thought it was: 光るためだけに光る.

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