Watching videos and listening to song lyrics in Japanese (with Japanese subtitles because it’s very hard for me to hear clearly yet) I’ve come across で at (what I think is) the end of a sentence several times.
I understood the で particle to indicate a mean through which an action is done but that clearly can’t be the case if it is at the end of the sentence. That’s why I think で is probably another form of だ in these contexts.
Here are some lyrics with this feature:
ここはどこで
今はいつで
俺は誰なのか
The first two lines end in で, perhaps indicating that the sentence hasn’t completely ended?
One of the definitions of で is the continuative (て form) of the copula だ.
私はアメリカ出身で、33さいです。
Basically it lets you combine two semi-related thoughts that could be independent sentences into one sentence, so that things aren’t so choppy.
The lyrics could be using that kind of で, since replacing them with だ would certainly be possible.
But they’d be kind of strange as spoken sentences in their current form.
I guess that’s normal for lyrics, which is why I almost never try to translate them in my own studies.
This kind of use of the て form is also pretty similar to “and”, since it just indicates that things happen one after another.
Like シャワーを浴びてズボンを履いて家を出た (I took as shower and put on pants and left the house).
Similarly I get the sense that in the lyrics you can think of it as the person asking “where is this” and “when is it” and “who am i”, even if it does sound kinda awkward if you directly translate it into english like that
