I am having a hard time parsing もとへも in the following paragraph of the story of the Kaguya princess. Is it the word 元へ plus the particle も? If I enter もとへも in DeepL, it translates as " (not) at all " which makes sense in the context. I looked for もとへも in several dictionaries but could not find any info and 元へ could be 1. back to your original position ( as in a fitness class ) or 2. er, rather (correction when speaking).
Thanks for any help.
2 Likes
Could you add the part just before this that she’s responding to? I suspect that would help a lot.
It sounds to me like, roughly,
“it doesn’t matter who would be by my side, I don’t intend to become a bride”
I believe “あなたのもと” could mean like, ‘your side’, as in ‘being by your side’ / being with you.
so どなたのもとへも sounds to me like “no matter towards whose side” (which sounds weird in english). / “no matter who with”
So it sounds to me like one (or multiple) of her suitors was asking her to marry him and she’s saying “it’s not you it’s me,” basically.
6 Likes
Thanks a lot! Everything you said seems very plausible. The page follows below. I thought that reading children’s book would be 楽勝 but then often some pesky little expression that I cannot find in 2 J-J dictionaries shows up.
4 Likes
Thanks again. One of the dictionaries I was using had four different entries for もと、with each entry having two or three or even six different meanings. I would never had picked もと as そば、かたわら。
2 Likes
Yeah, reading children’s books in Japanese can be challenging because those fairy tale princesses and knights speak in old-fashioned language. Or in the case of Yotsubato, sometimes she says something slightly off, which is funny if you understand what she’s trying to say, but confusing if you’re not a native speaker.
Another exampe: I read Crayon Shinchan in translation and he said いってきます instead of ただいま, and it’s not as funny translated to English.
2 Likes