Thank you @greasyButter!
So, if I see ん, or んだ, or んです, or の, or のだ, or のです, then the likelihood is, I’m looking at this explanation particle? That makes things a lot clearer! Thank you so much!
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こわいめ here doesn’t mean scary eyes. 目 here means an experience, which is the 4th meaning on jisho. So, it means,
“[Poor Catherine], held against her will, she must be very scared right about now.”
“[Poor Catherine], held against her will, she must be having a scary experience at the moment.”
These are poor translations, but hopefully you get the gist.
Regarding つかまっちゃって,
First of all the original verb is つかまる. Now, here we see the Vte shimau form. This is used to show the completion of an action. Example sentence,
私は三日でその本を読んでしまった。
I finished reading the book in three days.
Now, ちゃう (which is what we see here) is an informal form of てしまう (Note how after changing to て form, the て gets removed.
So つかまってしまう becomes つかまっちゃう. Now this is further changed to て-form, so we finally get つかまっちゃって.
Like @Cychloryn said, the てしまう form can also express regret depending on context, clearly this is the case here.
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I had no idea 目 could mean that, so thanks for bringing it up!
Upon more research, it looks like the verb following it is not ある (to be/have), but 遭う （あう） - to have an accident; to have a bad experience.
(This kanji seems to be an alternative form of 会う - to meet, but it carries a negative nuance, as if the thing you’re meeting is a terrible fate)
Wiktionary’s example sentence is: 「痛い目に遭う」 - “to go through something terrible”
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Page 63
I am in awe of you both! Wow! Thank you so much!
Who knows, perhaps I’ll be able to read Japanese like you both can one day (in the far distant future), but in the meantime… thank you so much!
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The explanatory の is actually just a nominaliser that has taken on a specific meaning.
Both explanatory and nominaliser の share the rule that だ before them becomes な.
The grammar is actually surprisingly similar to English “It’s that …”
“Why do you like cats so much?”
“It’s [just] that they’re cute”
(If you didn’t know about English speech patterns, this sentence would be rather confusing! What is “it” referring to?)
“that …” here is comparable to の
かわいいの
“It is” translates as “だ”/“です”
かわいいの(だ/です)
です of course being the polite form and だ being informal.
But we also know that some speakers like to drop the だ.
Since だ is optional, leaving it in has become a bit emphatic.
Kind of like how saying “It is a cat” might be considered a bit more emphatic than “It’s a cat”.
As a stereotype, women don’t like to make strong statements so they are inclined to leave out だ to soften the statement a bit.
Whereas men don’t really mind being loud and making strong statements, so they’ll include it more often.
Of course this is rationalisation but I find it useful to organise knowledge like this. It’s a kind of mnemonic, if you will.
(And I don’t want to encourage people to force too much English structure on Japanese, but if it matches, why not?)
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We discussed this above. It’s に (indirect object) + は (contrast marker). なつく is listed as transitive in Jisho but I think it’s intransitive (like 合う) here and takes an indirect object with に rather than a direct object with を.
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Thanks from me as well! I hadn’t known that.
Kuno lists a few patterns like this and notes
“This may be due to the traditional Japanese psychology of resignation that disasters are there and luckless people fall into their hands unavoidably.”
He also notes it’s ungrammatical to use this pattern with positive events
*うれしい目にあう (lit.) ‘to encounter a happy experience’
rather one says
うれしい目をする (lit.) ‘to do a happy experience.’
あう also works with bad weather (e.g., ふぶき, blizzard, じしん, earthquake) but not good weather (そよかぜ, a cool breeze, おてんき, ‘fine weather’)
(The book is actually in Romaji and doesn’t say anything about this being a different verb from 合う)
(His remark might be make more sense if you know/remember that にあう means ‘to meet with’ in a sense where the other person/the thing met is already there, whereas とあう means more like ‘come together to meet’.)
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Got it! Thank you so much @aiju! I’m copying this all down right now! What a fabulously clear explanation! Thank you so much!
People seem to be keen to ‘merge’ all the functions of が into one but I think it has three different functions:
- Subject marker (exhaustive listing)
- Subject marker (neutral)
- Object marker (neutral)
Exhaustive vs neutral means whether it implies there are others that have the same quality or not.
(There is generally no “exhaustive listing object marker ga”).
Dare ga gakusei desu? - John ga gakusei desu. (Exhaustive listing, subject)
If we’re talking about John, Mary and Tom, the answer would imply Mary and Tom are not students.
John ga kita. (Neutral or exhaustive listing, depending on context)
May or may not imply that someone else came as well.
Watashi wa neko ga daisuki. (Object marker)
Doesn’t imply that cats are the only thing I like.
There are a lot of tricky rules for when what applies. Some that are useful to know for “neutral” vs “exhaustive listing”:
- “X ga Y desu”, “X ga [i-adjective]” usually imply exhaustive-listing.
- “X ga [verb]” is often neutral, especially when X is a new element to be introduced in the conversation.
“Musume no Riri ga kita.” My daughter Lily (that I haven’t told you about before) came.
“Neko ga kita.” A cat came.
(wa instead of ga would instead imply that the subject has already been talked about) - Questions with e.g. “dare ga” often imply exhaustive listing with all kind of predicates.
Some that are useful for objects:
- Action verbs take “o” objects, not “ga” objects.
- Adjectives and state verbs (e.g. wakaru) take “ga” objects.
- Adding “teiru” does not change whether “o” or “ga” is used (generally), even though it might be a state.
- Some English state verbs correspond to Japanese action verbs and thus take “o”: to know (shiru, really: “to find out”/“to learn”), to love (aishiteiru), …
As usual with time you will develop a feel for what use of “ga” is what.
I find rules/generalisations such as this useful to not get completely lost while one doesn’t have a feel for it yet…
They also explain why people sometimes give contradictory explanations about this (they are thinking about specific contexts and predicates).
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A lot to study here! Thank you @aiju!
(Sorry but) I’m going back a few pages to p58, in the first sentence we see theしか + negative verb combination (in this sentence はいれない）and in looking around at explanations for this combination, somehow the negative verb gets translated as a positive verb. The last part of this sentence gets translated as “…because only the person who has the spare key can enter here.”
So my question is why does this negative verb get translated into a positive verb and is there a way for the verb to remain negative in translation while still retaining the overall meaning of the sentence…
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You could translate it something like, “because except that person no one can enter here.” or “because no one can enter here except that person”.
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OK, I could see it translated that way. So I’m wondering why those who explain the しか negative verb combo don’t translate the sentence that way.
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I think either way is fine. DoBJG contains some sentences which are translated one way and some sentences which are translated the other way.
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OK, so why wouldn’t there just be just one way by translating the verb negative in English.
I think translations focus on making it sound more natural rather than more literal (as long as the meaning is conveyed correctly). Take this sentence as an example, パーティーには学生しか来なかった。
We could literally translate is as, “Except for the students, no one came to the party.”
Now, consider this translation, “Only students came to the party.”
The meaning is exactly the same, but the latter sentence definitely sounds more natural.
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Just found more examples here. Obviously the しか in this case is the exception mentioned at the end of the article, the exception that says ‘while しか is often used in a situation that involves the speaker’s negative feeling, this is not always the case’.
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Ah, OK this article makes more sense in translating the verb negatively in English. I hadn’t seen this one before. Thanks
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Often whether the verb is negative or positive is a bit of a grammar technical point in Japanese that isn’t necessarily worth keeping in a translation.
English may instead convey the same meaning by changing other words around.
Everbody goes. <-> Dare(de)mo ga ikimasu.
Nobody goes. <-> Daremo ga ikimasen.
This whole subject goes under the name of “polarity”.
The first sentence is considered “positive polarity” and the second “negative polarity”.
In Japanese positive polarity = positive verb, negative polarity = negative verb in general.
(Unlike English where it’s more complicated to determine)
(Incidentally, polarity can be a bit of a tricky subject for English learners as well, because English often likes to swap around words when you change polarity
“I did it already.” <-> “I didn’t do it yet.”
There is quite a lot of pairs like this…)
(EDIT: I think “too” and “either” is a better example because “yet”/“already” is more varied among native speakers)
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Page 64
This first sentence is long!!
だが、あいかぎが なくても、
However, even if there were no spare key
どろぼうが - the thief
かぎあなから - from the keyhole
はりがねで - with wire
かぎをあけて - open the lock
はいったと - if entered
いうことも - also said
ありうる - possible
“However, even if there is no spare key, it is also possible to say that if the thief did enter the house, he opened the lock using a piece of wire in the keyhole”.
My translation is very wordy at best (utterly wrong at worst!) - any improvements?
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