銭天堂 | Week 5 Discussion

Don’t worry, I don’t always have time either, but if I’m going to look them up then I’m happy to share. :grin:

Also, I just wanted to let people know that if you want to add translations in a language other than English, you are more than welcome, it is very easy to add in an extra column.

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I finished this chapter this evening, and I have to say I really enjoyed it. Especially the little sister stealing the show, and leaving her brother in a position where he can’t keep scaring her. But also the biscuits coming to life and smashing down his bedroom door. (I would love to know what his mum thought about that when she got home!)

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I do use it, but to be honest I mostly use it to contribute (and as you can tell, I haven’t been doing a whole lot of that since chapter 1!).

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I was also completely lost here. And for good reason, it seems… This is way to advanced for me. Thanks @Carvs for clearing it out.

That being said, I stumbled upon some stuff while trying to figure it out.

I found this

https://kotobank.jp/word/天在る-198850

I think アメなる (天在る)is 枕詞(まくらことば). Google it on jisho and you’ll find the wikipedia links. The short story is… I didn’t read too carefully because I’m honestly not that interested… but anyway, the short story is that they are set phrases used in waka poetry to describe stuff. And while they originally had a meaning, lots of people started using them in their own poetry as literary references (… to show off, i guess :slight_smile: ) so with time it simply became something you “just said”.

If i got the kotobank explanation right, this is exactly the what we got. It is supposed to refer to 天にある日. But by the power of poetry logic, you can tag it onto anything beginning with a ひ.

There are loads of まくらことば and since they barely have any meaning they could have picked anyone of them. So I think アメなる is a pun… and besides 石 doesn’t start with a ひ anyway… or does it in some olde pronunciation?

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石 was いし, as far as I know, but a quick look in the BCCWJ shows many references to 天なる{父・神・山}, so it doesn’t look like it only attaches to ひ words… in any case, I’m not that interested either in the details of this particular word’s usage, so I’ll leave it at that. :stuck_out_tongue:

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You are right. ひめ菅原 and 一つ棚橋 was the two examples given, but that doesn’t have to be a complete list (and in fact it isn’t, as you have just shown). And the ひ-rule was mostly my own creation. It doesn’t seem to be an iron clad rule. Further down it says something about heavenly objects. God is in heaven… maybe dad is there too. And a mountain… can reach heaven? :slight_smile: So that seems to be another rule pattern. Maybe there are even more.

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Mind blown! This makes so much sense. Thanks for the cool explanations on the classical stuff! Usually I would have guessed the せん is short for せぬ or しない, but that doesn’t make much sense here. But now I know about classical volitional for future reference :slight_smile:

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Well, it could be せぬ for all we know. You have to guess, since in modern Japanese both forms contract similarly. I touched upon that in the other answer about んばかり. It’s unclear whether it’s ぬ or む.

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Well, turns out I didn’t actually have any questions for this week’s reading (I had two written down, but one had already been answered and I worked the other one out - hurrah).

So just thought I’d add my thoughts at least. I found this chapter really fun - part of the reason I didn’t have many questions was probably because I was reading pretty fast to see what was going to happen! I actually found it quite funny as well - the image of all of these threatening biscuit animals was for some reason just really hysterical to me.

The suddenly cool, calm and collected Emi (was that her name? I don’t remember now) didn’t ring quite true with me - I can imagine her being pretty flushed with excitement over having a way to threaten her brother, but she took the unexpected magical biscuit beasts rather in stride! Also, wow… hope she doesn’t go too insane with power! What a thing to give a small child.

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