yudantaiteki Wrote:

ktcgx Wrote:Quan, perhaps then it's better to translate it as 'the more jarring the footsteps sound, the quieter the room must be [for them to jar you so much]'

Are you suggesting this as a translation for 靴音すら耳障りなほど城内が静かだ。? That's not what it means. It means "The room is so quiet that even footsteps sound jarring/annoying/etc."

Yes, and the footsteps are jarring in proportion to the quietness of the room. I'm not sure why you're not understanding me.

Because that's not what the sentence means. "I went to Starbucks." doesn't mean "I drank coffee". I probably did, since that's why Starbucks exists, however that doesn't come into play here. The grammar ほど has nothing to do with proportionality.

ktcgx Wrote:Yes, and the footsteps are jarring in proportion to the quietness of the room. I'm not sure why you're not understanding me.

"the footsteps are jarring in proportion to the quietness of the room" isn't everyday idiomatic English so that may be part of the problem. But it sounds like what you're saying is that the more quiet the room is, the more jarring the footsteps are -- that may be a true statement, but it's not what the sentence means. The ほど shows the extent of the quietness. If you think of a scale of loudness, the ほど is marking where on that scale the room is.

I think I can sort of see what you're trying to say, but it seems like an attempt to understand every usage of ほど as connected to a "the more X the more Y" meaning. It seems simpler to me just to look at the basic "extent" meaning of ほど. A sentence like 学生が３０人ほど来た can't be proportional at all.　ほど has a wide variety of meanings, but they all connect to extent/amount better than they do to any concept of proportion.

Look at this example:
デトロイトは、時にはマイナス摂氏30度になるほど寒い地域である上、失業率並びに犯罪率が高い地域です。

"Minus 30 celsius" is an absolute quantity, not something that can be proportional. This is just marking the degree (extreme degree in this case) of the coldness.

Well, it doesn't really matter. My point is that there is an element of proportionality to the jarringness of the footsteps vs the quietness of the room. Carrying this on is just making a mountain out of a molehill, since we're obviously approaching this from two very different points of view.

ktcgx Wrote:Well, it doesn't really matter. My point is that there is an element of proportionality to the jarringness of the footsteps vs the quietness of the room. Carrying this on is just making a mountain out of a molehill, since we're obviously approaching this from two very different points of view.

The thing is there isn't an element of proportionality. The degree of quietness doesn't change anything. The problem you're having is that you're adding inferences into the sentence. So, supposing I say, I ate a steak for dinner. You're adding "with a knife and fork." Because that's how steak is eaten. That might very well be true, however, it's not in the original sentence.

Japanese is full of inferences.

Look, I'm really going to leave this thread, because there's really nothing more for me to add. You feel like I don't have a valid point. I feel like I do. Whatever. It's not worth sitting here saying the same thing over and over, on both sides.