pm215 Wrote:No, you're on topic, it's those other guys who were derailing...

How was I derailing the thread? I just pointing out a that Tzadeck's answer to someone's question was wrong and then gave the right explanation (which was totally on topic). Then my explanation was challenged using the usual examples (sentences with 2 がs etc) and I answered those challenges. The discussion then fizzled out (as people are unable to find actual faults with my arguments except to make appeals to higher authorities) as has happened every time this topic has come up.

I know things like this pop up sometimes, but I just noticed for the first time that "髪", the "hair" primitive doesn't have the 'hairpin' primitive at the bottom, but rather the 'elbow' primitive. I've been writing it with the hairpin radical all the time, but now that I've done an internet search, I can't find this version anywhere. Am I simply wrong, or is it acceptable to write this character with the full "hair" primitive? Thanks for any advice.

I can only find these:
髪 髢 髣 髦 髫 髮 髯 髱 髴 髭 髷 髻 鬆 鬘 鬚 鬟 鬢 鬣
with that top, and none of them have the 'hairpin' primitive at the bottom. And 髪 is the only Joyo Kanji

At the very least, rikaichan says that 髢 means 'hairpiece,' if that makes you feel any better.

EDIT: Copied to other thread

So what's your question? We can't help you without a clear example sentence and context. ;p

Looks like nest0r created the thread 'volitionality and transitivity' on the topic, so if you want to respond please post it there.

What does から + causative form mean? Here's my sentence:

女のコからいわせるつもり？

fakewookie Wrote:What does から + causative form mean? Here's my sentence:

女のコからいわせるつもり？

The causative form's not really significant here; this is just から attaching to the verb いう to indicate the source of what's being said. Compare this randomly pulled from google for a non-causative use: 女の子から言うのは、すごく、恥ずかしいんだけど。

So your original sentence is something like "You're going to make the girl [ie me] say it?"; google also pulls up some context:

google Wrote:タカシ えっ！　エンゲージリングって･･･。もしかして、結婚とか･･･？
めぐみ いやねぇ。女のコから言わせるつもりなの？　私はドラマみたいに、タカシさんからプロポーズしてもらいたいな。
タカシ プ、プ、プロポーズだって！　めぐみさん、ぼくと結婚してくれるの？

...where the general idea is "you're going to make me, the girl, say 'let's get married'? That's the guy's job."

I don't really get what's happening. Though I think your translation of "You're going to make the girl say it?" is correct, I can't see how the grammar is working here. It would make sense to me if it was 女のコにいわせるつもり？. But I don't see how

女のコからいわせるつもり？

and

女のコにいわせるつもり？

can mean the same thing. Unless using から instead of に or を with causative is just a standard thing that I've somehow never learnt.

They don't really mean the same thing. In the first case, the から is connecting to the underlying いう verb, not the causative pattern. In the second one, the に is connecting (probably) to the causative.

More literally it's like "You're going to make the act of saying come from the girl?"

From DoBJG: “The difference between に(3) (of source) and から(1) is that the former indicates the speaker's psychological closeness to a human source, whereas the latter
doesn't. This difference explains why に(3) is ungrammatical if the source is an impersonal institution to which the speaker can hardly feel close, as shown in [1].” (p. 295)

While I imagine there's some overlap (if you look at it a certain way), here it seems to put more emphasis on the fact that it's a girl rather than a boy doing the asking out (going by context from the subtitles, which I had to Google based on the isolated, contextless sentence).

As opposed, perhaps, to the girl as a particular entity?

Edit: Also, I've now learned a new pattern! からいうと and variations: http://www.learnjapanesefree.com/JLPT-gr...son-3.html (#4)

For ‘viewpoint’ (http://books.google.com/books?id=SszxbMt...22&f=false).

Well, I guess I see に in に言わせる as marking a destination, not a source. Hence I don't see how から, which can only be used with a source, can be used here.

fakewookie Wrote:Unless using から instead of に or を with causative is just a standard thing that I've somehow never learnt.

I think you're still getting hung up on the fact that the verb happens to be causative here. You can use から because the verb is いう, that's all (and whether you then put いう into causative form or not doesn't affect that or what the から is doing in the sentence).

I think nestor's quote and links are red herrings here: 女の子から言う台詞じゃない and 女の子に言う台詞じゃない have decidedly different meanings :-)

Yeah, that に/から overlap only applies to certain situations (mostly passives, and verbs like 借りる where the "direction" can't be confused no matter what particle is used).

The から here does mark the source, the source of the act of saying. It's a little confusing because the literal result is kind of redundant -- essentially it's （あなたが）（私に）女の子から言わせるつもりなの？ "You're going to make me say it from the girl?"

With object ellipsis! ^_^

Okay, I understand now. I never knew you could still use から with 言う despite it being causative like this. Thanks everyone!

I was really confused by the red herring thing, but I think I got what pm215 meant.

I just meant that if you want to retain the source meaning but use に, then the source in question would have a different feel from using から. I didn't think of it in terms of retaining the exact same sentence structure and just replacing から with に.

I didn't rewrite the sentence, which might've indicated what I was getting at more clearly by contrasting with fakewookie's strict replacement of に (keeping in mind this was before they mentioned the destination thing), because I suck at Japanese, so manufacturing exemplary variations of the sentences in question isn't something I can do with confidence.

Example: ジェーンは山野先生に生け花を習った。 - This is used in DOBJG as an example of when you could replace に with から, where Yamano-sensei is the source rather than an agent. The way I see it, even though we're talking about an entity as a source here, the reason you can replace に with から is because of the closeness to the in-group of the speaker/writer or whatever, so that talking about Yamano-sensei with から makes them more distant/objectified/general as a source rather than ‘Yamano-sensei who is my pal, buddy.’

So I applied that to the sense one might get from talking of 女の子 here as an archetype rather than on a more personal level.

I'm glad pm215 mentioned the red herring thing though, because it made me think about the agentive aspect of に and the kinds of rewriting you'd have to do in order to allow a から/に overlap in the way yudantaiteki mentioned before looking at the different connotations that overlap might entail in the resulting variations.

I'm unsure of a couple of things about the following sentence, could I get someone to check it?

チェーホフは居心地の悪さを感じていた。モスクワの文壇の雰囲気にうんざりしていたし、何かというと脚を引っ張り合う、気取った文学仲間にも馴染めなかった。

Chekhov felt that he was uncomfortable. He was fed up with the atmosphere of Moscow's literary circles, one could say they hold each other back, furthermore he couldn't get used to his self-righteous colleagues.

I'm assuming:
何かというと = If forced to say... (kind of like どちらかというと)
脚を引っ張り合う = doing together/to each other of 足を引っ張る (being an obstacle)

Does this sound right?

FooSoft Wrote:I'm unsure of a couple of things about the following sentence, could I get someone to check it?

チェーホフは居心地の悪さを感じていた。モスクワの文壇の雰囲気にうんざりしていたし、何かというと脚を引っ張り合う、気取った文学仲間にも馴染めなかった。

Chekhov felt that he was uncomfortable. He was fed up with the atmosphere of Moscow's literary circles, one could say they hold each other back, furthermore he couldn't get used to his self-righteous colleagues.

I'm assuming:
何かというと = If forced to say... (kind of like どちらかというと)
脚を引っ張り合う = doing together/to each other of 足を引っ張る (being an obstacle)

Does this sound right?

What if the first is ‘when speaking of something’ and the second is ‘pull each other's legs’ (like the English idiom)?

I also get the translation ‘kind of’ for どちらかというと.

And you left out 文学 in your translation, I think? So would that be ‘pompous literature’?

Hmm, yeah I've thought about the possibility of 何かというと being "upon saying something", but I guess どちらかというと was throwing me off. Can that mean "kind of"? I was going off of this definition. I extrapolated that it would work with the なに question word in the same way.

And yeah, I totally left out the 文学 part. I'm so terrible at translating long Japanese sentences to English =\

I found a translation for that 脚を引っ張り合う as ‘tripping over each other's feet’.

That makes sense. So I guess:
何かというと脚を引っ張り合う

becomes:
When they talk about something, they trip over each other's feet.

In context this would make sense I think.

What I got from that was that the entire phrase 脚を引っ張り合う、気取った is describing the colleagues.

Searching WWWJDIC gives: “何かと言うと 【なにかというと】 (exp) on the least pretext; at the drop of a hat” ... I wonder why that doesn't turn up in my 50 dictionaries.

It does seem to be tied into the idea of putting on airs, pretending to know everything when given the least pretext.

And 文学仲間 can apparently be translated to ‘literary circle’ also (so 文壇 could be ‘literary world/scene’).

So, starting with し, could it be “and what's more, he also couldn't adapt to how the literary circles tripped over each other's feet to act like know-it-alls when given the least pretext.”

Collaborative writing...fun. :-) Putting that all together, maybe something along these lines could work: ...and he couldn't fit in with the pretentious literary crowd who try to thwart each other at every turn.

(I get 'smiling backstabbers' from it, but I guess that's going a bit too far...) Here's a few more taken from Kenkyusha's examples:

何かと言うと: at every opportunity, (bicker) over every little thing, no matter what, at the least provocation, always, etc. (wide application, not limited to pretensions)

足を引っ張る: hold back, stand in the way (colleagues), slowed down (economy), etc.
[edis - arg I need spell checker]