More trouble with conceptualizing…
バレンタインの友チョコを買いに行ったんだけど、結局自分用チョコしか買わなかったわ。
I went to buy some Valentine’s chocolates for my friends, but in the end I only got some for myself.
So. My deal here is that “自分用チョコしか買わなかったわ” seems to mean “only self-purpose chocolate didn’t buy.” Which, to my head, makes it seem that the sentence literally reads:
Valentine’s friendship chocolate I went out to buy it, however, in the end for-my-personal-use chocolate only did I not buy.
More naturally,
I went out to get valentine’s chocolate for my friends, but I ended up not buying nothing but chocolate for my own use.
Yet it’s supposed to be coming out as “in the end I bought chocolate for myself only.”
Is that because that clause with しか can be seen as more like a sentence meaning reversal for only everything it refers to? Like, the surrounding sentence means, “I went out to buy chocolate for my friends, but I didn’t buy that after all”, and “nothing but chocolate for myself” gets inserted into that, which negates the “not” that’s bundled in “didn’t buy” but only for the object/concept referred to by しか??
I’m hoping…really really hoping, that that’s what’s going on. Because I can’t get another thing happening out of that without either breaking the “particles refer to what precedes it” or just saying something really really unsatisfactory like “this is a colloquialism”. I effing hate that kind of thing…I mean, yes, colloquialisms are groovy and everything and the choice to share this as an example is incredibly valuable but i really really want to believe I will not have to wrestle through things that colloquially mean the opposite of what they’re saying.
Because so far in trying to read I’ve run into just so many phrases and sentences end up meaning the opposite of what I think they’re going to mean that I’d much prefer to be finding out something incredibly deep here about the way stuff is getting grouped up in Japanese differently from English than just running into an important colloquial phrase/concept. I really want this to be one of the golden keys.
Here’s my lessons music: