-
Where is this sentence from? Are you sure of the spelling? The 「っ」looks more like a typo than anything else. 「大きな町ではみな忙しくて、他の人のことなんて…」would be regular grammar, with the て connecting the clauses.
-
なんて is just emphasis. In this case specifically it gives the sentence this nuance of “they don’t have even the time to think about more urgent matters, let alone other people”.
3 Likes
The って is just an emphasized て-form here, similar to やはり → やっぱり.
For the て-form, it’s less common to have this shift; I think I remember reading that it’s something that women tend to use more than men.
Doing some googling, I found another example for this: an album of an idol group called 美しくってごめんね
7 Likes
Honestly didn’t think of yahari and ppari, but yeah って is fine and a bit more colloquial.
2 Likes
Kiki’s Delivery Service. 
Ah, thank you. I’ll try to remember its use for emphasising.
Thanks, that makes sense.
1 Like
Uh… I’m not 100% certain, but I think なんて is rarely used for emphasis, and is in fact often used in order to sound dismissive/to lightly mention something as an example in passing. (Every single definition for this sort of なんて in 大辞林 included the word 軽視.) Even if it’s not necessarily dismissive or condescending – which is what I saw on a Japanese grammar site – it’s ultimately still just a way of raising an example or making something more vague (kinda like the word ‘kinda’ – see what that does?). To get the meaning of ‘let alone’, we’d need to replace のない with もない.
You can find examples of this usage in Tobira chapter 13 dialogue 1, I think. It’s also confirmed in the last sentence of the ‘additional remarks’ section on Goo辞書:
4 Likes
I think I’m slowly getting it. Not quite emphasis, but I see how it can be mistaken as such.
Now my understanding is that the people in big towns don’t even have the ‘free time’ to think about a thing such as other people.
Am I right?
1 Like
I think maybe it’s a bit judgmental? As in, the diminutive nature of なんて could imply something like the people in big cities are so busy they don’t have time to consider [such trivial matters as] other people (i.e. they consider themselves far too busy and important to not be selfish ****s).
I’m not quite confident in that interpretation though. Could be my own biases/views leaking through.
2 Likes
Yup, that’s essentially it.
Yeah, this is possible too. Only context will tell, but yeah, it’s quite possibly dismissive.
@ekuroe: The way I’d translate it is ‘In big cities, everyone is busy, and [you’ve] only [got] people who don’t have the leisure to think about stuff like other people/everyone else.’ I need context to be sure that it’s accurate, but I’d say that it’s fairly likely that なんて here is dismissive, or at least, it suggests that thinking about other people is accorded little importance/time by those busy people. (That is, they don’t necessarily not give a damn about other people, but such thoughts are a really tiny portion of their lives.)
3 Likes
Hmm, okay. I’m definitely understanding how なんて is used a lot better now, so thank you.
1 Like
What’s the difference between 彼女は地位もなければお金もない & 彼女は地位もお金もない ?
(The example was taken from Bunpro)
This is just my opinion, but I think it’s the difference between ‘she has no status, nor does she have money’ and ‘she has neither status nor money’. I don’t think their meanings are different though. The first probably just places more emphasis on her plight/the things she lacks, whereas the second is more to the point and is perhaps more objective/factual-sounding.
3 Likes
Wouldn’t the first one mean more like “If she didn’t have her social status then she wouldn’t have money either”? Or is this some kind of set phrase I’m not aware of.
1 Like
Aも〜ばBも~ means ‘A is/does 〜, and B (too) is/does ~’. It’s listed as N3/N2 grammar on some sites. Try googling ‘も ば も grammar’ for more examples.
3 Likes
I guess I always just parsed it as a conditional when I saw it. Doesn’t it seem to imply more of a relationship between the two things due to the conditional? Like wouldn’t it be weird to use this expression if A and B are entirely unrelated?
A sentence from New Kanzen Master about this point juuuuust came up in my anki reviews, coincidentally.
Here’s the sentence:
そんな人、会ったこともなければ名前を聞いたこともありません。
That example makes it sound like the emphasis is on both being lacking. Like - “Not only haven’t I met anyone like that, I’ve never heard the name” vs. a more neutral “I don’t know them and I don’t know their name.”
The given definition for “XもならYも” is just “both X and Y” though so agree it’s just a matter of a little more/different emphasis.
2 Likes
I do think the conditional in the form and the emphasis on “both” imply some kind of relationship, even if it’s just a slight rhetorical one. But it doesn’t seem to literally be a conditional. (though I think parsing it like that internally is fine)
Here’s a couple other example sentences, for what it’s worth:
-
人生には楽しい時もあればつらい時もある。
-
妻はお酒もよく飲めば甘いものもたくさん食べる。
1 Like
Yeah I am seeing that reading it literally as a conditional isn’t quite right. But I was looking at some example sentences and I noticed that they tended to be related which was why I was asking. Like for example would something like お酒はよく飲めなければお金もない… Would that be nonsensical because it’s implying a relationship between two things that aren’t related? Not sure if you have an answer but I am just wondering this now. I guess even if so, it’s more of just “saying something that makes no sense” rather than a grammatical issue.
I just checked Tobira, and they said ‘Although the form of the verb here is conditional, the meaning is not conditional in this usage.’
I indeed don’t really have an answer either, and the New Kanzen Master books can be a bit frustrating in letting example sentences do a lot more work than the actual explanation. 
I think personally (for whatever that’s worth) reading something like your お酒はよく飲めなければお金もない makes me try to imagine contexts where it would make sense - like someone refusing after just being asked if they want to buy an expensive cocktail.
I think it’s kinda the same with “both” in English though - saying “I both don’t drink and don’t have money” would be weird if there was no implied relationship, and I think that’s the same difference.
both X and Y
vs.
X, Y
or
X and Y
connote slightly differently despite meaning the same thing, and I think that may be going on here too.
1 Like
Yeah that makes sense, it’s kinda funny 'cause I tried really hard to think of an entirely nonsensical example, but I kept thinking of ways that context could provide a sensible use case.
1 Like