涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱: Week 2 Discussion

Well, of course, you can flip things around to remove certain senses. That wasn’t my point; rather, I was saying that maybe what best captures the ambiguity (for me, not sure if it really exists :woman_shrugging:) in the original is a similarly ambiguous translation.

By the way, in other contexts, だけ can also take different scopes, e.g., ハルヒだけと vs ハルヒとだけ. But I don’t think you can do that here; some particles can split the verb like も or さえ (as infinitive+particle+する), which changes the scope, but not だけ I think.

Anyway, it wasn’t meant as a very profound remark, just I though it was fun that I could construct an ambiguous sentence in English too. :zipper_mouth_face:

I’m super late with the reading this week. Probably because after reading コンビニ人間 this feels so much harder ;_;
Hopefully I can still make it.

Some questions (sorry there are no page numbers):

Summary

「わけの解らんこと言われて追い返されただろ」
At first I though it said something like… “being told something nonsensical and being turned away” but I’m not sure about the meaning of 追い返された here and the だろ is throwing me off as well.

中学時代にもわけの解らんことを言いながらわけの解らんことを散々やり倒たおしていたな
I don’t get what the last bit means.

「石灰せっかいで白線引く道具があるだろ。あれ何つうんだっけ? まあいいや、とにかくそれで校庭にデカデカとけったいな絵文字を書きやがったことがある。しかも夜中に学校に忍しのび込んで」
I’m guessing the bolded part is shortened like the 解らん from before but this time I have no clue what it is supposed to be.

しかし昼飯に一時間もかけないだろうし、そういや授業中の合間の休み時間にも必ずといっていいほど教室にはいない奴やつで、いったいこどをうろついているんだか。
I get completely lost in the bolded part. What even is こど?

And that’s it for today. I’m ded :skull_and_crossbones:

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I think you pretty much got it, though? だろ is just だろう shortened. Something like “let me guess, she turned you away saying something nonsensical”.

Quoting from my previous post:

? やり倒して seems to be やる+たおす, as a colloquial (dialectal?) suffix similar to まくる “do nothing but”. I looked around but couldn’t find an authoritative reference, and it’s not in any dictionary I have; some seemed to think it had an Osaka flavour.

I read it as:
つう = という
ん = の

こど I’d say just a typo for どこ. Xといっていいほど is literally “so much that you might as well say X (必ず)”, here, “so often that you might as well say always”.

In case you’re wondering it’s (I think) 言って(も) except も dropped. It happens, not a lot in normal sentences, but quite often in set expressions. :upside_down_face:

It’s どこ in the book(in my copy, at least), so you probably just made a small mistake while copying it :slight_smile:

It seems obvious now, but I always tend to have trouble with だろう for some reason :thinking:

Ohh, that makes sense.

Thanks, that was very helpful!

Aaand I just realized the furigana got copied again D:

Yep I just checked my actual ebook and it says どこ as well… I’m readind the text from a DRM free source that allows me to use Rikaikun for speed purposes and it said こど for some reason :woman_shrugging:

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Ah I actually meant to type という. :sweat_smile: Or (っ)ていう; anyway, yeah, it’s just your old quotation.

EDIT: Also I only touched on what I perceived as the difficulties in each case, but if others want to chime in with more detailed breakdowns…

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My brain read that anyway so…time to sleep probably

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While it would be somewhat cool to actually do it, it seems like a bit too much effort for something most people probably won’t even notice and I don’t really know if my hair is long enough for it to be possible to change it into enough different hairstyles that I’d like yet anyway. That part did make me think of something else though. There was a girl in my high school (or, well, our equivalent) that changed her hairstyle really often - probably multiple times each week - and most of them included various amounts of hairbands. Who knows, maybe she got to the idea for it from Haruhi :woman_shrugging:

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*giggles* That makes me wonder… what year would that have taken place in? Or if you don’t want to answer that, did it take place after the anime came out?

… GAH… I haven’t even looked at the book once this week yet. Gotta do some of it before we meet tomorrow night.

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I never even got past that first sentence on page 1… Only because of a lack of time, not because it was hard :disappointed_relieved:

It was just a few years ago, so yeah, it was quite a few years after the anime :slight_smile:

I’m slowly getting through this when I have little bits of time.

A ranking of the girls…eww.

I’m pretty sure I had more doubts last night but I forgot so…

Summary

I was pretty confused reading this sentence…pumpkin what
まるでそこらの男などカボチャかジャガイモでしかないと思っているような平然たる面持おももちで脱いだセーラー服を机に投げ出し、体操着に手をかける。
I guess the overall meaning is about how they might as well have been pumpkins or potatoes because she didn’t care but I’m not sure which is the correct meaning for まるで here or what the でしかない is doing.

それにしてもやけにグラマーだったな……いや、それはさておき。
I don’t get the meaning of グラマー

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“Glamour” = glamorous, good looking. But yeah, I was looking at it going “… grammar?”

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I just read it pretty literally - “just like( まるで) (it seemed like she thought they were) no more than (でしかない) potatoes or pumpkins”.

Can’t actually explain anything about why though(or say I’m 100% confident, because I’m literally never 100% confident, no matter what) :woman_shrugging:

And as an additional disclaimer, I haven’t actually read that part in the book yet, I was just planning on doing that now.

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でしかない is the split copula である; the copula takes topic/focus particles between the で and ある. That’s why you say でない, である, でしかない, etc. For some reason, which is not entirely clear, people don’t say (or at least don’t write) *しかじゃない. Martin seems to suggest that this is a restriction on *しかだ (which is not possible, even if you quote and negate the whole thing later on), which extends to *しかで. So the meaning is “as if thinking that those boys were (nothing) but pumpkins and potatoes”.

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And to be fair, I agree with Haruhi on this one. Boys are just potatoes.

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Well, now’s the time to play catch up… week 3’s reading is for two weeks. ^^

@Ditto20 Haha, so yeah, probably?

Possibly spoiler-y answer for Sylph

Yep, that’s what the anime translated it as. She doesn’t care, sees them all as if they might as well be potatoes.

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In case anyone’s still interested, I went and asked a native speaker for their opinion on this だけ, and, I might have misunderstood, but as far as I could tell, they thought that it was none of the suggested possibilities (I suggested “precisely because I sit there” and @Gyoshi “just sitting there doing nothing else”). :man_shrugging: They said だけ was to be taken as reinforcing the meaning “(only) by chance”, “(only) coincidentally” (of たまたま, I guess), thus resulting in something like “there’s also the fact that, [even though I didn’t do anything special,] I just ended up sitting there by chance”.

Ah, and about しけてやんなあ the same person said they agreed with your interpretation, Gyoshi: i.e., it didn’t really make sense that it’d be て+やんなあ but since they say it so much in Kansai, people just add やんなあ out of nowhere basically meaning なあ or ねえ as a kind of inserted interjection. So basically “it’s boring (and)… nee” with an unfinished sentence. :woman_shrugging: Oh well, if you’ll excuse me, I think I should go and cry alone in my pile of grammar books. :sob:

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I’m re-reading, and I enjoy all the snark thrown by the narration at Taniguchi.
谷口はまだ話している。
Also as a stylistic thing, I like the narrator talking to us, or other people.
安心したまえ、言ってない。おかしいのは涼宮ハルヒの頭のほうさ。

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Actually, I read that as Kyon talking to the girl who came to say something to Haruhi. If I remember correctly, she was wondering if she had said something strange due to Haruhi’s reaction. (I think she was trying to have a chat about a popular drama or something?)