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This is a simple looking sentence that I just can't wrap my head around. It is supposed to be written by a child in a letter.
mazu kubi ga nagai kirin o mimashita.
The translation given is:
First, I have seen the giraffe with the long neck.
But I can only make sense of this if I split it in two separate sentences:
1. kubi ga nagai (desu)
2. kirin o mimashita
The neck is long. I've seen the giraffe.
But putting these two together doesn't seem to make any sense to me:
kubi is the subject, nagai clearly refers to kirin, kirin is the object, the verb is mimashita. So it would translate to:
First, the neck saw the long giraffe.
Here is another sentence with similar structure, which I don't understand either:
it too wa mimi ga chiisai afurika zoo deshita.
One of them was an African elephant with small ears.
How can I make sense of this? Is this just some very informal, childish langauge? -
The sentences are correct. In Nihongo, an independent sentence ended with i-adj, na-ajd and verb can be used as a modifier to modify a noun.
Thus the sentence you quoted is structured as this:
[Mazu] { [kubi-ga-nagai] [kirin]} [o] [mimashita] in which the [kubi-ga-nagai] is a modifier to modify [kirin].
However, the translation you made is structured as this:
[kubi] [ga] {[nagai-kirin] [o] [mimashita]}. Grammatically it is correct but it does not make sense.
Following is an example.
kare ga sono ie ni sundeiru. (He is living in that house)
watashi ha sono ie ni ikimashita. (I went to that house).
You can connect the two sentences into one.
watashi ha kare ga sundeiru ie ni ikimashita. -
Your translation of "First, the neck saw the long giraffe." would be correct only if the particle was "ha" as in,
Kubi HA nagai kirin o mimashita
Japanese does this thing where when you're talking about attributes you say X GA (attribute).
For example, if you say someone has long hair, you don't say:
XX daredare ha nagai kami o motteiru
Instead, the correct way is:
daredare ha kami ga nagai desu.
Or:
daredare ha hana ga ookii desu
It works for cities as well:
Oosaka ha tabemono ga oishii desu
The food in Osaka is delicious. -
Recall that が originally had a meaning quite similiar to の and only (relatively) recently came to be used for marking the subject. Its older meaning is preserved in some common phrases such as the one in this topic, literally translating to "giraffe, which is "neck-long", I saw". Confusion only arises when one attempts to understand this phrase taking が as marking the subject.
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In this Discussion
- blutorange May 2010
- ccpan May 2010
- damaged May 2010
- Jumex May 2010
- louis May 2010