銭天堂 | Week 6 Discussion

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!

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/

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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One more question /o/
On 39% there’s this sentence: 「ホーンテッドアイス」と、おどろおどろしい字がはりついたふたを、ぱかりとあけた。

I can’t find anything about ぱかり, it seems that it’s connected to opening all the time, but I have no final conclusion, so any help is appreciated /o/

Edit: Can it be ぱっくり? :thinking:

Maybe. I also thought it might be based on パカパカ, which Jisho says means “clip-clop; clippety-clop”, which I think could describe the sounds of the lid being taken off the container.

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Yeah, I was wondering about that one. The closest thing that seems to make sense that I found was ぱか which is an onomatopoeic word for opening the lid of a container:

I am not really sure about the りと part though. I could swear I’ve seen it added as a suffix in various onomatopoeic words, but I can’t seem to find any explanations or examples at the moment =._.=

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と is how those kind of words are connected. I think it’s actually the quoting particle, though I’m not sure (since it represents a sound, etc., you’re “quoting” the sound.)

@Carvs posted some “rules” about how you can “build” mimetic words, and one of those is that you can add り/ん/っ, so that’s definitely what’s going on here.

That’s how I got from ぱかりと to ぱかぱか. It looks to me like what you found is the same word, too.

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To add to that, quoting from Hamano (hiragana mine):

/N/ (ん) indicates that the action involves elastic objects or is accompanied by a reverberation.
/Q/ (っ) on the other hand indicates that the movement is carried out forcefully or vigorously in a single direction.
/-ri/ (り) […] indicates ‘quiet ending of the movement.’

So yeah I agree it’s probably ぱか (single movement as opposed to ぱかぱか multiple movements) + り (she didn’t tear it away forcefully but opened it quietly) IMHO.

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Wheee, here I go!

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Slowwly making my way through this (Thanks everyone for the notes you’ve left. :slight_smile:)

I’ve seen とき used a few times in a way that I don’t quite understand, for example on page 55:

一歩一歩すすんでいたときだった

Also back on page 50:

恐怖のあまり、気絶しそうになったときだった

My understanding is that ときだった means approximately “it was a time when ~”. But that translation feels awkward for both of these sentences. Is there a different sense that applies here? Thanks!

(My apologies if this makes no sense because I have no context at all…)

Would the translation be more plausible if you phrased it as “at the time when ~” or simply “when ~”?

https://www.wasabi-jpn.com/japanese-grammar/time-clauses/

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I could swear that we talked about this construction at some point but I can’t remember which thread and I can’t find it. D: Basically, from what I remember, we decided it was kind of a suspense-building technique. In English it would be more like “Right when X was happening…something else happened! (:scream:)” It translates awkwardly because in Japanese, the first part is its own separate sentence, whereas in English, it probably wouldn’t be (or it would end with an ellipsis, rather than a period).

So it is using the “at the time when” meaning - just imagine an ellipsis at the end of the sentence. “It was at the time when X was happening…when (whatever’s in the next sentence happened)”

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That makes sense, thanks so much. :slight_smile:

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Hah, only took me nine months to get back to this…

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