I am currently reading 魔女の宅急便, and I have come across the following sentence:
町の高い木という木のてっぺんにぶら下がっている銀色の鈴です。
I understand the general meaning; One or more silver bells are hanging from the top of one or more tall trees in the village.
Deepl translates this as ‘It is a silver bell hanging from the top of a tall tree in town’. My question then is, what function does the という have? I would have translated it as something like “A silver bell is dangling from the top of the tree called ‘the tall village tree’”.
Effectively yes but という is used so often and in so many situations in Japanese that it’s a lot less forceful than it sounds in a literal English translation. In fact when I first read the sentence above I didn’t even really notice it and had to backtrack when I read your question to see where it was used. It’s also probably why deepl doesn’t bother to translate it at all.
I think maybe a more accurate translation would be something like “the tree known for being the tallest in the village”. It emphasizes that it’s not just an objective description used by the narrator but the actual way the tree is known to see townspeople.
Thank you both. @simias you say 'known for being the tallest in the village, which was something I also thought of, but I don’t really see anything marking it as tallEST, just ‘tall’. But is this another subtlety of the language that I’m not getting yet?
Oh you’re right, I guess I just extrapolated because if something is known as “the village’s tall tree” and then it’s not actually the tallest it would be a bit of a misnomer.
But also it’s possible that it’s plural here maybe? The village’s tall trees? But the という actually makes me think it’s one singular tree. So I guess that’s another reason to use this construction, to emphasize that were talking about one well known tree.
i can’t remember the exact context of the page here but i feel like if it was talking about loads of bells on loads of trees it would have been a bit more explicit about it. but maybe it reads both ways?
Okay, thank you all for the feedback. From further context (and from an actual illustration in the book that I just found ) it seems like there are bells in all the tall trees of the village! I would also not have guessed that, but this was a good discussion and it’s always interesting to try to understand the nuances of this cool language!
Stuff like that is why these days I turn to ChatGPT to translate sentences which I struggle to understand. DeepL just seems kind of… bad these days. (Usually Google Translate is a fair bit better than DeepL, but in this case it also doesn’t catch the meaning of the XというX grammar pattern.)
Meanwhile…
Take everything it says with a grain of salt and double-check any grammar explanations you ask of it by researching yourself, but I’ve been using it for over a year and its translations have been really helpful so far.
) it seems like there are bells in all the tall trees of the village! I would also not have guessed that, but this was a good discussion and it’s always interesting to try to understand the nuances of this cool language!
