Week 19: 博士の愛した数式 - The Housekeeper and the Professor 🎓🧮

Japanese Language Reading
#1

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博士の愛した数式 - The Housekeeper and the Professor :mortar_board::abacus: Home Thread

Week 19

hakase

Start Date: Jan 23th
Previous Part: Week 18
Next Part: Week 20

Reading:

Week Start Date End Phrase End Page End Percentage Page Count
Week 19 Jan 23th [End Chapter 10] 269 94% 13

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Week 20: 博士の愛した数式 - The Housekeeper and the Professor 🎓🧮 [END]
博士の愛した数式 - The Housekeeper and the Professor 🎓🧮 (Intermediate Book Club)
#2

Shop, now that I’m caught up, I can ask questions again!

I found the following sentence* odd:
「公式に当てはめて計算したんじゃないんだね」
Here’s what I make of it–
公式 formula
当てはめる to apply
したんじゃない didn’t do it
んだね。right?

you didn’t apply a formula, did you?

I’m not exactly sure what that has the do with 博士’s assertion that below the first start, the sun looked as though it’s what was chipped off was a good thing. It was proud that (the Tigers) would win today, to seeing the championship.

I guessing it* means something like 'that’s not real", but I don’t know if the “formula” things is an iduom, or a creative metaphor.

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#3

You skipped a bit in your breakdown :wink:

公式に - formula
当てはめて - applied
計算した - calculated
んじゃないんだね - didn’t you?

By applying the formula you calculated that, right?

For the context, sorry I have no idea :sweat_smile: Maybe somebody else can help out here?

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#4

I think you already got it pretty much!
They’re talking about whether the Tigers will be able to win today; the professor says Sure they can! Have a look at the moon, it is chipped off, that’s a good omen.
Then Root says:
„Wow (disappointed). You didn’t even plug that into a formula and calculated it… You‘re just blindly guessing!“
Because he expected the professor to have a reason for his assertion that the Tigers will be able to win, but he’s just going off of nonsense good omens :laughing:

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#5

Isn’t it the sun? I thought maybe it was chipped from barely setting.

Context tells me this is “you didn’t, did you,” rather than “didn’t you,” but I can’t point to the Japanese grammar to explain why. Maybe that first ん? Maybe the difference is determined by context?

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#6

This chapter got so ominous after the third page, I couldn’t put it down.

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#7

For me it’s the んだね at the end that shifts the meaning to your interpretation (which is correct going by the context)

„You did, didn’t you?“ would be 計算したんじゃない？ with stress on the したんじゃない？
But here it’s したんじゃないんだね。, stress on the ない, which makes it „You didn’t, did you?“
(I swear it makes sense in my head)

I checked again and it’s actually the 一番星 :sweat_smile:

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#8

Ah, fair enough :sweat_smile: Sorry for the confusion!

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#9

一番星の下の端が欠けたように見える日は、いい事があるんだ。

Okay, I need to back up, because I understood it like this:

一番星の下の~ : the ~ under the first star

端が欠けたように見える日は: as for the sun that looked like an edge was missing.
いい事があるんだ: There is something good.

as for the sun under the first star that looked like an edge was missing, there’s something good…(it’s proof that (the Tigers will win) the championship.)

Are you saying that it’s
一番の星の~ : The ~ of the first star
下の端が欠けたように見える: ~ that looks like
the lower edge is missing
日は、as for the day

on days when the lower edge of the first star looks like it’s missing…

Comments?

I can picture what it might look like to have the sun under the first star have a missing edge, but what does it mean for a star to be missing the lower edge?

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#10

I don’t know what he means by „it’s missing an edge“ tbh, but for me it can only be interpreted as „as for the days on which 〜“
一番星の下の端が欠けたように見える. If he were to describe the sun, I would expect some sort of marker where the relative clause begins. Otherwise it would probably always be interpreted as „It looks like the lower edge of the star is missing“
I think it would be extremely weird to just start a relative sentence connected with の without even a comma or something. (一番星の下の、端が欠けたように見える: like this. If you don’t have any indication that a different thing is described now, you would always read the の in quick succession and expect everything to still be about the 一番星.)

Going from context, it has to be something that doesn’t happen every day, right?
という日は、いいことがあるんだ on the days that 〜, something good happens.
If it were „sun“, the link to いい事がある is kind of weak, I feel? „As for the sun, good things happen.“ This sounds kind of incomplete to me, and doesn’t really make sense to me on its own (without some free form interpretation). I would expect something different, like „If 〜, then good things happen“.
Interpreting it as „On 〜 days, good things happen.“ makes more sense to me. Since he’s using it as proof that something good will happen today, I think that interpretation is very logical context wise as well.
That’s why I didn’t even think of interpreting 日 as „sun“ to be honest.

Only caveat is that I don’t really know what he’s talking about :joy:

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#11

It’s true, in my head, I added a pause right there. I forget that commas in Japanese are often for just those kinds of pauses: the comma rules seem very different than English.

I was just trying to make it into something sensible… Like I said before, a chipped sun I can imagine, but what the heck is a chipped star?

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#12

The first star might actually be Venus, which, depending on the orientation, would exhibit phases like the moon. It would be small, but there might be a perceptible difference to the naked eye… especially to an astute mathematician.

Although the extreme crescent phase of Venus has since been observed with the naked eye, there are no indisputable historical pre-telescopic records of it being described or known.

That chapter was… rough. I was excited for the party. Then of course, it wasn’t going as planned, and finally when Root is ready to pull out the trump card… oof. Man, at one point I thought maybe 博士 might have died, but somehow this was worse. It’s crazy how much these mundane day-to-day things become so dramatic, and how vested I get in them. It reminds me of the earlier days of Terrace house where things were generally boring, but Oh No! Someone ate my steaks!

edit: I just looked it up, and check this out: AstroArts: 【特集】宵の明星・金星

「宵の明星」とも「一番星」とも呼ばれる金星ですが…

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