It’s the second time I got tricked thinking that ば form is strictly conditional, (I even posted in this thread about similar issue here) but clearly for some case it’s a bit looser.
Also I completely failed to notice that かと思えば can be seen as another variant of the かと思おもったら / かと思おもうと set phrase that I already knew. But actually I was a bit confused by this grammar point before, but your explanation really cleared it up. It’s literally : Just when I thought “some question”, then something happened.
Edit : Oh and thanks about the 何だ part ! I knew it was some kind of surprise feeling, but not the specifics about outcome differing from one’s expectations or predictions.
I just came across the vocabulary word: 通る which is listed in WaniKani as an intransitive verb meaning “to pass” or “to pass through”
Per my understanding, intransitive verbs do not take a direct object. But when I think of the english equivalent “to pass through”, I feel like there is usually a direct object – the place you’re passing through. In the sentence, “I passed through Canada”, isn’t Canada a direct object?
Compounding my confusion, when I look at the example sentences, I see を!
お茶会のためのメープルシロップを買うために、カナダを通ってイギリスに行った。
I stopped by Canada on the way to England to get some maple syrup for the tea party.
So what gives? How is 通る intransitive if it can take a direct object?
を can be used if the location is the “direct object” of a “motion verb”.
To quote a StackExchange post:
I think it is better to think of this を as a location marker meaning “through/across ～” rather than thinking of it as a direct object marker. Simply, を has two distinct functions. Many verbs related to motion take を in Japanese, and they are usually categorized as intransitive verbs in dictionaries.
And then to add further, を can also be used to mark the location of where movement begins when paired with verbs like 出る. Here’s from The Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar:
Those linguists… it’s almost like they want you to be confused.
Interestingly, even in English, phrases like that occasionally get written in ways that look a lot like transitive verbs with a direct object. “Cross the street” is an obvious example pretty much all the time, as far as I’m aware. We’ll also use phrases like “swim the English Channel” or “hike the Appalachian Trail” in more uncommon cases. I’m betting English dictionaries will still categorize both of those verbs as intransitive, though.
Thanks @athomasm and @Leebo, that helps a lot! I’ll adjust my thinking about を to be a little more nuanced from now on.
Sound like I’ve got to pick up the pace of my grammar studies – one Japanese class a decade ago and the first few chapters of Genki 1 just aren’t cutting it anymore.
I’d also recommend getting A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar if you haven’t already. It’s an admittedly expensive but invaluable reference. I always use it in combination with Bunpro for getting further info on grammar points. For example it has four separate entries on the usage of を.
ない is actually an i-adjective, so I don’t think you can directly attach it to a noun like that. I think the grammatically correct version is わけがない. It literally sounds like you’re saying a reason for something doesn’t exist. Now I’m not an expert on what sounds “natural” so this may very well be the natural way to say what you’re trying to say. To answer your question . . .
綺麗じゃないわけがない = a reason which isn’t pretty doesn’t exist.
綺麗がないわけがない = a reason in which prettiness doesn’t exist doesn’t exist.
In the first sentence, prettiness is a property of the noun (わけ in this case). In the second sentence, you get the sense that prettiness is something that has it’s own independent existence.
To get to what you’re trying to say, I think you have to take what you’ve already written and simply nominalize it using の, or こと. Then you stick the potential form of ある (ありえない = can not exist) onto it.
綺麗がない + のが + ありえない + わけ + が + ない = a reason in which prettiness is not able to not exist doesn’t exist.
Or I guess in natural English it’s more like “There’s no reason why it can’t not be pretty”. There are too many negations to be honest lol.
Usually, i-adjectives come before the noun. If you want to put them after the noun then you need to mark the noun with が (as far as I know). His original sentence was わけない (which could just be a typo, or maybe it actually is natural and just some weird exception).
Yeah you’re right. A lot of na-adjectives are nouns but 綺麗 is that exception.
EDIT: That also means 綺麗 can never mean “prettiness” so that whole translation is wrong. Only the first sentence is correct.
So to get the correct sentence, I think you’d have to add a noun beforehand and then use きれい to describe it. Like this.
それがきれいじゃないのがありえないわけがない。
EDIT 2: I posted the above sentence on HiNative and they corrected it to それは汚いに違いない. Which is like “Without a doubt it’s dirty”. Probably because there are too many negatives in the sentence.
I’ve thought some more about that 気づけば / 気がつけば, and while I don’t have a definite answer, I’ve come up with some possible explanations, if you’re interested.
Speculation on 気づけば
So, first of all, I do think it’s mostly lexicalised as an expression; that much hasn’t changed. However, the question remains as to why ば would substitute for たら or と here, whereas it usually doesn’t.
Especially since, according to Ono and Jones (2009), Conversation and grammar: Approaching so-called conditionals in Japanese, ば occurs with very low frequency, at least in spoken Japanese, outside of set constructions. One of the foremost uses of ば they highlight is ば＋positive (e.g., ばいい). This is IMHO quite interesting, because they hypothesise in passing that the prominence of that construction might bleed into other expressions which normally don’t take ば, making them more palatable with ば.
I think the key here might be that while going over the thesaurus, you can find that 気づけば lists as quasi-synonyms such terms as いつのまにか “before one knows”. This is relevant because in いつのまにか, the speaker is not aware yet, but in 気づいたら “when one realises”, they are. This would seem to indicate that, at least initially, the counterfactual interpretation (as dictated by normal grammar) of 気づけば maybe should not be ruled out completely.
So, I speculate that one possible explanation as to the acceptance of 気づけば+past as a quasi-synonym for 気づいたら+past is that its syntactic meaning “if one had realised” combines with the positive expectation to create a feeling of “…it would have been good”, in its normal use expressed by よかった or something. And then by slippage or ellipsis, becoming “before one realised”, easily assimilated to いつのまにか, but also, by substitution of the conditional, to 気づいたら.
That being said, that’s just a whimsical theory of mine concerning word formation; that is not to say that the expressions should be interpreted differently when encountered.
While I think it’s fine to think of it as “I was wondering who it was”, as @jneapan translated it, let me offer a couple of tentative arguments as to why it could perhaps be construed as conditional.
In short, IMHO it's fine to gloss that literally as "if one wonders who's there, then to their surprise it's you" though it is not idiomatic English
Similar to what I was discussing above, I believe there are actually two purported interpretations of かと思うと: the temporal “when I thought” and the speech-level “if one thinks that”… but since both show surprise / contrast at something unexpected, it’s a question whether they’re actually treated differently by (all/most/many) speakers. Note that the second interpretation, being conditional, is compatible with the normal semantics of ば.
The argument in favour of the existence of a second interpretation is that Xかと思｛うと・えば｝Y generalises quite freely into a construct “not only X but also Y”, including when both X and Y describe an objective state, e.g., “there are …”, which makes the temporal interpretation difficult. Martin 1975 glosses the construction as “if you thought X then to your surprise (also) Y”.
Additionally, I’ll mention that 誰かと思えば is often used to translate “look who’s here”, which does obviously not mean that it is the literal meaning, but you could draw an analogy with そう言えば “now that you say that”. Notice that in “now that you say that”, the fact that “you said that” is not a prerequisite to whatever follows (which would be true regardless of whether “you” said something related or not); the implication is at speech-level: the fact that “you” said it leads to the realisation that…
For 誰かと思えば（あなただ）, we could similarly imagine “I/one wonders who’s there (and here you are)”; obviously, the fact that one wonders does not imply whether “you” are here or not, but, at speech-level, it leads to the (surprising) realisation that it is “you”.
EDIT: Though note that in そう言えば, the meaning is closer to “as” than “if”, which is the classical meaning of ば, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, so this argument is weaker than I would like.
Lastly, the acceptability of かと思えば might also have something to do with the parallel usage of ば, “X and also Y”, as in XもあればYもある… but that one seems strongly constrained by the presence of も, so I’m not sure what argument could be made convincingly there.
Anyway, all this goes to show that it can be hard to pinpoint such a precise literal meaning, inasmuch as the phrase 誰かと思えば is kind of fixed for use in such a situation. Looking further at other uses of かと思えば (and かと思うと), they do not seem restricted to contexts of “(when) I was thinking”, so I’m not convinced that in a fundamental sense it should be treated as “when” even here… but in practice, I think it’s fairly safe to say that (some/many/most?) people could treat the three versions with ば・たら・と as interchangeable in most circumstances, in a basic sense “with regard to X, we have Y, which is unexpected”.
Usual disclaimer: it’s just my opinion, I may well be dead wrong. (But it’s a fun question to ponder.)
I would say it’s the normal それに “in addition”, followed かの = あの “that”, except it’s more literary and/or connotes “that well-known”. So “that well-known accident/event/day” in your case, I guess? But someone else maybe parses that differently?
(But it’s a fun question to ponder.)