Yeah, I’m not generally much of, like, a study aesthetic person (my study log is very unexciting visually 
), but in this case, I took advantage of someone doing most of the template work for me, so it looks a lot better for way less effort than anything I could have come up with 
. It’s mostly just a distilled down version that cuts out all the messiness on my study log and threads like this one, so it’s a convenient resource hub, but all of my actual learning happens in the messiness, so I think of Notion as like something nice to have but optional.
- 衣食住 すべてそろった 偽装品
いしょくじゅう すべてそろった ぎそうひん
Shiny toys-
Seems I’ve got all life’s
Necessities
3-6-4 
Again I had a slightly different interpretation to you all, so I decided to post a bit later so as not to add confusion. However @fallynleaf 's find 「偽装品」vs 「偽造品」made me reconsider. Maybe this is intentional wordplay?
To clarify, my interpretation is The author has a nice set of fancy knickknacks (or perhaps fancy clothes or brand knockoffs「偽造品」) that make it look like they have all of life’s necessities when in reality they are struggling to get by. It reminds me of The Great Gatsby for some reason, but I’m sure everyone can think of someone who acts like they are rich by buying commodities they can’t afford for clout.
Monday, March 6, 2023
Previous senryu
- 衣食住 すべてそろった 偽装品
いしょくじゅうすべてそろったぎそうひん
all you need! / everything is here! / bootleg goods
Notes:
-
Tough call, but I think I liked this one best.
-
The feeling I get i that it’s about a vendor’s booth like you see in or around train stations.
-
I’m not sure if 偽造品 vs. 模造品 means anything here. I think the same subtlety exists in English (“counterfeit” vs. “imitation”).
Current senryu challenge
Volume: Ladies
- 編んだのが私と知らぬ娘の彼
This one seems pretty straightforward once you puzzle out the wording. Pure spoilers below.
I think the key is figuring out that the subject isn’t simply “knitting”, it’s about: “I did the knitting”. The grammar is a little tricky, too, with the が where it is and the non-quotational, “interactive action” usage of と.
I won’t annoy anyone with a diagram, but I think an English transliteration would be something like “(The one) who did the knitting was me. Not-knowing was daughter’s boyfriend” (pure Yoda-speak). It’s not really a single sentence.
Remember to please use the spoiler tag with your translation attempts! Also, please include the reading in kana with your submission.
Everyone is encouraged to participate, no matter your level! Questions and comments are as valued as translation submissions.
Please try not to be disappointed if your translation isn’t selected or if you disagree with the daily choice: the judge isn’t terribly consistent with his grading (and has awful taste!).
Online tools like dictionaries, sentence databases, and even AI translation engines are fair game and can be extremely helpful. Yomichan is particularly handy if you use the Chrome or Firefox browser. The 語源由来辞典 is also an excellent resource for researching the etymology of various words and expressions.
Here are the links to the 356 Japanese originals (spoiler free) and to the the spreadsheet with all the upcoming senryu as well as the translations to date.
This took me several goes to figure out, but having got there, I don’t think your analysis is right.
The と is quotative; it’s quoting 編んだのが私 “the person who knitted it was me”, and it attaches to 知らぬ to give “doesn’t know that the person who knitted it was me”. 知らぬ is modifying 娘の彼, so this is one of those poems which is just a noun-phrase, not a full sentence. A plain translation would be something like “My daughter’s boyfriend who doesn’t know that the one who knitted it was me”. (With “it” here being a scarf or something the daughter has given as a gift, presumably.)
(It does also syntactically parse a second way, something like “The ones who knitted it were me and the boyfriend of my daughter who doesn’t know”, by making the と be the “and” one, but that makes no sense so we can ignore it 
)
It doesn’t parse as 「◯彼と知らぬ」？
I mean, I understand the meaning, but I’m still struggling with と as quoting anything.
No, because 彼 comes later in the sentence – whatever the と is attaching to and whichever of the various と particles this is, it must be attaching to a word or phrase that precedes it, which is to say either the noun 私 or the whole phrase 編んだのが私.
The use of quotative-と with 知る is apparently somewhat subtle, but it is possible.
There is apparently a proverb of vaguely similar form, but I suspect it’s super obscure because it seems to be listed on just two websites. This may be more confusing than enlightening:
饅頭の木と知らぬ杣の子（まんじゅうのきとしらぬそまのこ） 木樵（きこり）の子は饅頭など見たこともないから、饅頭の木というのが、実は見慣れた檜（ひのき）のことだとは気が付かない。卑（いや）しい者は、とかく知識も不足しがちだということ。 ★「饅頭の木」は、檜の異称。枝葉の茂った様子が饅頭の形に似ているところから。
I don’t think 偽造品 vs. 模造品 is relevant for our purposes, but I do think 偽装品 vs. 偽造品 might be, since their readings are so similar, and 偽装品 does not appear to be an actual word (google has only 10 results for it…), whereas 偽造品 is. I personally appreciated the article because it helped me understand the nuance of 偽造品 better, so I thought it was worth linking .
Sorry, I dashed off my last reply from my phone as I was walking out the door. I didn’t exactly make it easy to understand what I was trying to say.
I meant that, to me, sentences like 「お母さんが病んだと知らなかった”」don’t feel quotational. It’s not the “interactive action” usage I linked to, either, though, so I’m unsure what it’s called. It’s not the conjunctive (“and”) usage nor the “quoting something” usage, so what is it?
EDIT: Actually, I think it might be the “strong causal relationship” usage (or at least something very similar). I’m not precisely sure what’s causing what, though. Mumblety something caused me not to know?
To me, “quotational” means literally quoting something that someone said (or wrote).
Knowing something, understanding something, learning something, etc. feels conceptually different than literally hearing or reading something that someone else literally said.
It doesn’t seem to be limited to 知る, either. This not-exactly-quotational-to-me usage of と also works with 分かる, and 習う, at least, and almost certainly other verbs as well.
Lastly, I think ending with a noun phrase is what makes my transliteration sound so much like Yoda-speak: “(The one) who did the knitting was me. Not-knowing was daughter’s boyfriend”.
Possibly.
It’s poetry, so subtlety abounds, but typos are also possible! (What do you call IME typos? 
)
My Japanese definitely isn’t up to the task. If there is a deeper meaning than “fake/counterfeit/camouflaged/disguised goods” I’m not understanding it.
My wife is in Japan, but I’ll text her and my daughter to see if they think it’s relevant.
Oh! Definitely. Thanks for the find – never hesitate to link to anything that helps the discussion.
Daughter says “Maybe a typo for 偽造品？”
Still possible it’s a generational thing my wife will understand. Will let you know what I hear.
Daughter followed up with:
Uhhhh. If there is [a hidden meaning], it’s too hidden for me too.
It’s the same と as in あれは猫だと思う, 犬がワンワンと鳴いている, 赤ちゃんがスヤスヤと眠っている etc (to steal examples from the Tofugu article). The natural English translation is usually not a direct quote but rather an indirect one (“I didn’t know that your mother was ill”, etc), but this is the と people usually call the ‘quote’ と, not some different grammatical thing. It does a wider range of jobs than literal quoting, but quoting is kind of its core meaning and ‘quotative’ is an easy way to refer to it. Especially in お母さんが病んだと知らなかった it’s taking a complete sentence お母さんが病んだ and attaching it to a verb for something your brain does, so this is pretty close to its central meaning.
I think you’ve just been confused by the label people tend to give this particle. Especially Japanese does not make the strong ‘direct quote’ vs ‘indirect quote’ distinction English does.
It’s definitely not the strong causal relation particle (aka the conditional).
There is also an ambiguity within the phrase 知らぬ娘の彼.
There is an interesting feature of sentence-level pitch accent that disambiguates the scope of modifiers like this in spoken Japanese. (In English we can use pauses and stress changes to achieve the same effect.)
In the phrase 知らぬ娘の彼, a full pitch rise between the first and second mora of 娘（むすめ）will force the parse:
“the {boyfriend of my daughter} who doesn’t know”
whereas suppressing the initial pitch rise of むすめ after しらぬ will instead force the parse:
“the boyfriend of {my daughter who doesn’t know}”
Indeed.
Japanese people are generally unaware of this feature of pitch accent, since the process is entirely unconscious.
Here's how the rule works
If a modifier is tightly bound to the immediately following element, the initial pitch rise between the first and second mora of the immediately following element is suppressed. If the modifier is bound less tightly to the immediately following element, the initial pitch rise of the immediately following element is more prominent. This has the effect of ‘resetting’ the pitch back to the baseline, thereby creating an audible signal that there is a syntactic ‘break’ between the two elements.
It was definitely worth linking, if only for the joy of reading the Google Translation.
Here's how Google Translate describes the difference
"The terms “counterfeit” and “counterfeit” are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same thing.
Counterfeit products are designed to resemble the original product. Visually, counterfeit products may look almost identical to the original, but they are often made from lower quality materials. Counterfeiting involves the misappropriation of a brand owner’s intellectual property by using the brand owner’s trademark to trick consumers into believing that they have purchased a genuine product.
Counterfeit products, on the other hand, may resemble the branded genuine product, but are usually not the same. Counterfeit products do not contain the same trademarks or logos as the original product. For example, a counterfeit product may have the brand name misspelled on the product and the consumer understands that they are not buying the genuine product."
- 編んだのが私と知らぬ娘の彼
あんだのがわたしとしらぬむすめのかれ
Daughter’s boyfriend
Is unaware that
I knitted it
(4/5/4)
Yup. I should try actually reading the articles I link to instead of blindly grabbing the first counter examples from what I “know” isn’t correct… 
Mea culpa. But I don’t see those examples in either of the tofugu articles on と:
The closest I see is 「難しい質問だと思う」 in the first first article.
I like their description of this usage as quoting your own thoughts (not literal written or spoken words). That captures the difference I felt but was struggling to express.
I agree that「お母さんが病んだと知らなかった”」means “I didn’t know that mom knitted [it]” and is an example of “quoting your own thoughts”. This is why it only works with verbs like 思う、習う、知る、etc.
I think the “strong causal relationship” usage I mentioned is for things like「先生が喋ると寝る」(I fall asleep whenever the teacher speaks) and works with almost any verbs,
犬がワンワンと鳴いている and 赤ちゃんがスヤスヤと眠っている are both in the “for marking quotations” section of the first article. I’m not sure where I got あれは猫だと思う from now, but the article on 思う and 考える has an example それは魚だと思う which it says is using the quotative particle.
Yes, this is unrelated[*] to the quote-usage; it’s a conditional and like the other ways of expressing conditions the before and after parts can be whatever you like; eg タイヤは古いとあぶないですよ “tyres are dangerous if they are old” which doesn’t have a verb in sight. Quotation-と is attaching a sentence to a verb, but this conditional, like English “if”, is a subordinate conjunction that attaches one clause to another.
[*] except in as much as the Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar claims that all the modern uses of と etymologically derive from a single source…
This is definitely the obvious reading if it wasn’t a senryu, but it would make it 5/7/6 – I wonder if there’s an alternate reading for the last line that makes it 5 syllables?
This is why I don’t like thinking of 形容詞 as adjectives and prefer to think of them “the Japanese way”: as sentence ending predicates that happen to also be able to modify nouns.
My weird brain doesn’t parse this as the adjective “old,” but as the “verb” (state of being) “is-old” which doesn’t have an exact equivalent in English (we have to use two words).
古い here is a predicate, no? タイヤは古い is a complete sentence.
As is 危ない. The です just makes it polite as you pointed out in another thread. If I understand correctly, the conditional / causal relationship usage connects two clauses, one following or caused by the first.
Yes, exactly. My point is that this is why it is structurally different from quotative-と, which must connect to a real actual verb (and more specifically a speaky/thinky one, or suru).
To continue flogging the deceased equine, my point was that “quoting” your own thoughts seemed qualitatively different than literally quoting something someone said or wrote. That’s why I was trying to find an alternate usage pattern other than “quotative”.
Thinking of it as quoting your own thoughts rather than it’s own distinct usage pattern makes sense, I’d just never thought about it that way before. It didn’t seem “quotative” to me at first.
Tuesday, March 14, 2023
Previous senryu
- 編んだのが私と知らぬ娘の彼
あんだのが・わたしとしらぬ・むすめのかれ
Daughter’s boyfriend / Is unaware that / I knitted it
Notes:
- Apologies, seems a week or two got away from me yet again.
- The original appears to be a 5/7/6 unless someone has an alternate reading
- My dictionary says 彼 is a potential reading with this definition:
遠称の指示代名詞。その人・物が、話し手・聞き手からともに遠い所にあることを示す。あれ。かれ。「―の木の道のたくみの〈徒然草〉」
- I don’t think the か reading is likely though, because the dictionary also says that it usually takes the の particle when read this way (as in the example above). That example is wild: four の’s, no? Wait, that’s five. (ducks)
Current senryu challenge
Volume: Various Settings
- お噂は聞いていますと吹き出され
Oh, goody! Another use of と！ 
Remember to please use the spoiler tag with your translation attempts! Also, please include the reading in kana with your submission.
Everyone is encouraged to participate, no matter your level! Questions and comments are as valued as translation submissions.
Please try not to be disappointed if your translation isn’t selected or if you disagree with the daily choice: the judge isn’t terribly consistent with his grading (and has awful taste!).
Online tools like dictionaries, sentence databases, and even AI translation engines are fair game and can be extremely helpful. Yomichan is particularly handy if you use the Chrome or Firefox browser. The 語源由来辞典 is also an excellent resource for researching the etymology of various words and expressions.
Here are the links to the 356 Japanese originals (spoiler free) and to the the spreadsheet with all the upcoming senryu as well as the translations to date.