Boku dake ga Inai Machi Please help me understand

「君のいる町」(きみのいるまち) is “A town where you live”. How does が in OP’s post change that? As I look at this, this noun phrase is about the town while the が in the other phrase makes it about 「僕だけ」? I suck at determining focus.

Thanks for any clarification folks can offer.

Not the person you mentioned, but the difference is the subject of the sentence.

君のいる町 → 町 is being modified by 君のいる
君がいる町 → 君 is the subject of the sentence

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I would argue that that 君の is modifying いる町 so that “you” is outside of the realitive clause, not inside of it, and that it a noun phrase, not a sentence as Japanese sentence have obligatory verbs

This gives the bad-but-literal translation of “Your town that you are in”

Actually, although it may seem to be outside of relative clause, but it actually is not. By default with Japanese grammar, modifying element must come before the object it’s modifying. This chain of modification is only lightly mitigated by the addition of verbs to demarcate where these clauses end. (I say lightly, because clauses chained with て-form verbs imply a logical progression as well) Furthermore the particle の has properties that allow it to act like が in cases where you want to place the focus on the noun being modified by a relative clause. So the wording of mrsaturn’s answer made it seem as though one clause was modifying 町 while the other was not; that’s not exactly correct. Both clauses modify 町, but the focus (or subject, which was what mrsaturn was referring to) is shifted from 君 (in latter) to 町 (in the former), but only by default since there isn’t a particle explicitly stating a definite role for the entire clause.

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I don’t know any of those grammar terms you put there :stuck_out_tongue:

I said that 君のいる is modifying 町 as you can replace 町 with any other location to say “the xyz you are in.” If you added more details past that: 君のいる◯には動物が一匹もいませんね。Since you can modify nouns with verbs, it makes sense to state that the location is getting modified by the stuff before it.

君のいる市
君のいる国
君のいる家

いる町 by itself sounds odd :3

I see. Thanks for clarifying :smiley:

I was under the impression that の’s function as a focus in this construction was because it removed it from the embedded clause, making the two np’s sisters rather than a mother-daughter pair rather than adding emphasis an element of the subordinate clause.

I will have to go did through some of my syntax books again ><

Can anyone help explain the grammar behind のびたのばか?

Someone is calling のびた a ばか. You could also say Mrsaturn先輩のエッチ :wink:

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This is true for other parts too though.

”The town where x is"
父のいる町
友達のいる町

“The town where you x”
君の住む町
君の生まれた町

Good point :slight_smile:

cause you are totally not reading the subtitles of the anime anyway…

I don’t understand why Machi is at the end of the sentence.

From what I can tell it’s kind of acting like (descriptive phrase) town.

(Boku dake ga inai) + machi = Boku dake ga inai machi.
(In which I didn’t exist) + town = The town in which I didn’t exist.

They localized it as “Erased,” I think, because there’s not really a solid, intuitive way to phrase a literal translation in English.

The phrase and the explanation will make more sense if you’ve read/watched it, since there are time and memory shenanigans going on.

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To add to what foozlesprite said, Japanese doesn’t use relative pronouns. A relative pronoun is a word used to connect two or more sentences together to create a more complex, but concise sentence. For example, “Wani Kani is a website. It teaches people how to read kanji.” These sentences as is are okay, but it sounds stilted because native English speakers simply don’t speak this way. If a relative pronoun is used to replace “it” with “that” and you’d get, “Wani Kani is a website that teaches people how to read kanji” . The word “website” is bolded because it is the word that is modified (i.e., more information is given) in the sentence. Coming back to UglyCalendar’s question, in Japanese words which modify other words must go before the word(s) they modify. In the case of 僕だけがいない町, 町(まち) is modified by the phrase that comes before it (foozlesprite demonstrated this in their explanation); this contrasts to how it would be written in English, “The town where I don’t exist.” the words that modify “town” come afterward. That is why 町 comes last.

Although I don’t know why the localized name of this anime was changed to “Erased”, I’m dubious of the fact that a direct translation was an issue. I say this because 坂道のアポロン was localized to equally awkward “Kids on the slope”; I’m pretty sure there many other examples out there.

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In the show, Hinazuki writes a poem about how she wishes she could be in a place far away from her town- and so the town would be “The town without only me” (me being Hinazuki). The irony of this is that

spoiler warning

in the end, it’s Satoru who ends up being “missing” from the town. He did all he could to change the past for the better, and ends up in a comma for the rest of his life as a child- so the town was changed because of him, except it had to go on “without only him”. So it’s Satoru who ends up getting this treatment as opposed to Hinazuki. That’s the point of the title, the town was “without only Satoru”, even though it couldn’t have been changed for the better without him.

It’s called Erased in English because Satoru is “erased” from his town, despite the fact that he saved 3 lives to end up that way. It’s a lot easier to describe “me” as “erased” than it is to describe the town as “without only me”.

Ah, right, thanks for reminding me!

I would assume that it’s also because in Japanese long title names common, while in English titles are generally short.

Hahaha, yes, I imagine this is also the case. =P

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