銭天堂 | Week 6 Discussion

Japanese Language Book Clubs
1

Week 6 Discussion | Pages 54 - 62+

Chapter 3: ホーンテッドアイス

Start Date: 8th June
Last Week: Chapter 2 Part 2
Next Week: Chapter 3 Part 2

Zenitendou

銭天堂 Home Thread

Last sentence for eBook readers:
ものはひとりでに移動したり、とんだりし、携帯電話には、どことも知れない番号からぶきみな声で、「ここにいるから」と留守電が入ってくる。
+The last sentence runs onto page 63 this week

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Me in my happy place, at about 9:30 this morning :grin:

coffee%20%26%20zenitendo
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(A corner of a café, with no-one to disturb me!)

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Done with this week’s :slight_smile:

The only thing, I think, I had a problem with and couldn’t figure out myself was right toward the beginning.

Page 54

昼間の暑さもさることながら、熱帯夜のむわわあんとした蒸し暑さときたら。

I understand most of it, but I’m not able to parse the long string of hiragana: むわわあんと. Anyone know what that is?

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I’m really far behind and haven’t gotten to this chapter yet, but could it be an exaggerated/alternate form of もわっと? The Jisho entry lists むわっと as an alternate form, and I could see the extra syllables being some sort of exaggerated pronunciation (like it’s reaaaaally thick with moisture and hard to breathe).

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Ah, good call, that sounds reasonable. Better than my theory, I thought it might be some feeling evoking sound effect, wawaa sounds a bit like wafting clouds or waves of heat or something.

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While I definitely agree with @windupbird about the first part being むわ “foggy stuff that fills a space” I think your intuition about the second part isn’t bad in general, わーん being something like “lots of noise that reverberate”.

Normally, I would have analysed it as むわ＋わー（ん） but わーん makes no sense, as it’s usually for sounds, so I guess as windupbird said, it might best be taken as a partial reduplication of the わ from むわ, with extended vowel. If I get that right, the わ in むわ could describe either softness or (wide) breadth/extent of the phenomenon or both, so duplicating and extending it could underline the spreading nature of the thing? Well, that’s how I interpret it anyway but it’s highly non-standard, I think, so there might not be a definite answer, except if we asked the author. :slight_smile:

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Yes, I think that’s what it is because the writer uses another variation on p60 which is むわあっとした.
おかげで、 むわあっとした 暑い空気の中も、へいきでかけぬけられた。

I would go with むわ meaning “thick with moisture/hard to breathe (air)” as windupbird said because of the context.

According to H. Fukuda, ん has different meanings depending on whether it refers to sound, movement, or condition.

So when referring to sound , ん indicates that the sound echoes or reverberates. (ex. こんこん)

When referring to movement , ん refers to something that rebounds, spreads out, or is particularly forceful (not something that is confined, controlled, or weak.) (ex.ばたん)

When referring to established conditions or states , ん emphasizes the established condition.

Ex. どろん (どろどろ) indicates that a thick, highly dense liquid is floating, focusing on the condition of floating.

So depending on whether you think the word is referring to sound, movement, or condition, I guess you might translate it differently.

熱帯夜の むわわあんとした 蒸し暑さ

Personally, I think the word is referring to a condition rather than movement.

むわ = thick with moisture/hard to breathe (air) (むわっと）

わ = duplication of わ in むわ (I think)

あ = to elongate the あ vowel sound of わ for emphasis

ん = emphasizes an established condition

と = this adverb takes the と particle (ex. むわっと)

した = suru verb

So after going through all that, I end up right back with windupbird’s translation “reaaaaally thick with moisture and hard to breathe”. But it was a nice mental exercise for me to go through anyway. Sorry about that.:roll_eyes:

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Hum yeah; I think we mostly agree though? :sweat_smile: I’m not sure if there’s some specific difference you wanted to point out. (I probably gave a more general description of the adverb, though, but indeed the specific sense here should be “thick with moisture” or something like that)

I went through Hamano’s original thesis again (which, AFAIK, is the first complete survey on the topic), when thinking about this, to check for anything special I might have missed, but, as I said, I think we are mostly in agreement here, which is reassuring!

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I hope to read Hamano’s thesis because I’m still learning about this stuff and trying to read whatever I can get my hands on. It’s rather long so I hope it doesn’t take too much time to completely read. Thanks for your feedback as I’m still unsure about a lot dealing with onomato words. :+1:

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(This is straying a bit from the topic, but hopefully others won’t mind too much.)

The thesis is actually very readable, and the text really isn’t very dense, so you should definitely give it a shot, if the subject interests you! I’m not the greatest when it comes to morphology/phonology (in fact I’m the greatest at nothing, haha), but from my experience, the papers tend to be a lot less cryptic than, say, Chomskyan syntax or semantics based on modal logic, if you’re not used to them. And Hamano’s is less cryptic than most in the category, plus you’ll find it repeats a lot of what you probably already know from other less formal sources!

P.S.: Also, once you read that, you can build on top of it to read more recent papers on the topic, if you really like it. I haven’t, but that’s because I don’t care that much about mimetic words, so the basics will suffice. :sweat_smile:

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OK, I’ll give it shot.

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I haven’t read any myself, but at some point, you’ll have to do bibliographic work, similar to what you would do for your PhD or your graduate course. I would say a good starting point is to consult one of the various introductions or handbooks of Japanese linguistics that have an entry on mimetics: they will also have a list of references and suggested readings. For example, my copy of Tsujimura’s Introduction to Japanese Linguistics lists: Hamano 1986 and 1998 (that’s the thesis), Mester and Ito 1989 “Feature predictability and underspecification: palatal prosody in Japanese mimetics”, Nasu 2002 and 2008 “Phonological markedness and asymetries in Japanese mimetics”, Kurisu 2009 “Palatalisability via feature compatibility”. I haven’t read any of those (save for Hamano’s thesis) but the set seems to focus a lot on palatalisation. Anyway, the other way you could search for papers would be to look at who’s citing the original thesis, and go from there. Good luck. :slight_smile:

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Thanks, much appreciated!

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Some questions please meow~

At 38%

美紀はもう、ひざまずかんばかりだった。
It seems ひざまずく ( 跪く) means kneeling, but not sure how that turns into “ひざまずかん”, or what it means in that case.

どれくらいつかわれていなかったのやら
From my understanding どれくらいつかわれていなかった would mean 「to what level it was left unused」 I am having trouble with the のやら at the end. From what I found やら seems to denote uncertainty, and is used in some grammatical constructions like どうやら (apparently) and やら～やら (whether ~ or). None of those seem to be the case here though…

Any help is appreciated!

I am sad that I struggled like 10 minutes figuring out that お守りがわりに was actually 代わり rendaku’ed =._.=

But anyway, ice cream yey :icecream:

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OK, I went grammar point hunting and found these for you.
Number 8 on this page:

Also listed here:

I have the impression she was so enraptured by the sight of the ice cream that she just wanted to fall to her knees and beg to have some.

I think maybe the のやら here is half of this construction that you mentioned above?

So I think it is something like: It was a coin she had found under the tatami, and whether it was the result of not having been used for who knows how long (or some other reason, who knows), at any rate it had gone completely green.

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Yes, it’s “she was on the verge of falling to her knees” (whatever the reason). The construction is disputed, AFAIK. It’s either from -(a)mu bakari (literary volitional/conjectural + bakari) or -(a)nu bakari (literary negative + bakari). It’s impossible to tell precisely, since both reduce to -(a)n in modern Japanese, and apparently you can find both in sources, and even -(a)nai bakari, so that’s that…

To me, with MU, it would be something like “at the point she would fall to her knees”. With NU, it would sound like “barely not falling to her knees”. Sense would be the same, anyway. It’s also confusing to me, because bakari, just like dake, has both a meaning “only”, “just” and another meaning “approximately” (similar to hodo). This is probably all due to the etymology, assumed to be from hakaru so “measure”, “approximately”, “limit”, “only”, “just”… not exactly univocal. :woman_shrugging:

It’s actually no + yara. No is the particle/nominaliser/pronoun and is common before yara but adds no meaning. Yara is treated as a particle in modern Japanese. It has a meaning very similar to (daroo) ka, and at the end of a sentence it’s a self-addressed question: “is it?” or “I wonder”. So here, “I wonder how long it has gone unused” or somesuch.

Etymology of yara

Yara is thought to come from yaran < yaramu < ni ya aramu (dropping ni and contracting ya ar-). So, if you’ve been following my digressions in these threads, you’ll recognise ni aramu, the MU form of ni ari (=nari), the classical copula. The important thing is that ya used to be the other interrogative particle (similar to ka). So, if we are to believe this etymology, it was exactly daroo ka, except with naramu instead of daroo and ya instead of ka (classical interrogative particles used to float and not be confined to the end of sentences).

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Thank you! I still struggle with japanese sites about japanese grammar, but I was able to understand these ones :slight_smile:

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Yeah, I’m still following along, it’s so cool to be actually reading something real as opposed to a graded reader or easy news (which also is cool, but this is way cooler :slight_smile: )

I must admit, I don’t get all the details, most of the sentences make me go “hm, now what was that particle for?”, but I get the gist and even the odd full sentence.

It’s funny how many words appear in that story that I just had in my lessons!

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I’m finally catching up \o/
But at 35%, there’s this sentence: とてもとても、クーラー代まで手がまわらない

And I don’t get it at all, especially 代まで :thinking: Thanks in advance /o/

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代 is used meaning cost, or bill here, like 部屋代 for example means rent
クーラー代 is the aircon cost

And 手が回らない basically means that it doesn’t reach that far? Unfortunately I couldn’t find an entry in an English dictionary, but my German one says 手が回る: to chase after, to reach

So combining with the とても: she can’t afford air conditioning by a long shot

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