turvy Wrote:Thanks for the insight @yudantaiteki, but just tell me how to parse this. I got:
その山に that mountain
登る climbing
だけ … ??
の十分な体力がある。there is enough strength
As someone else mentioned, the だけ goes with の to connect it to 十分な体力. You have to have something in there -- ほど, だけ, etc. otherwise there's no marker of the degree. There's no word that represents the "enough" in the English translation.
Quote:> He has enough strength to climb the mountain.
This is kind of things drive me crazy, how can you learn / understand this? I like your explanation but isn't there a simpler way to put this? What's the difference between "その山に登るだけの十分な体力がある" and "その山に登るの十分な体力がある"?
The second is not grammatical, for one thing. If you take out the の it becomes grammatical but I'm not sure that would be said by anyone. その山に登る is not something that represents a degree, so you can't just use that phrase by itself to represent someone's level of strength. Of course you can make the intuitive leap in your mind how that can be a strength degree, but for the Japanese you need to put something in there to make it explicit.
Look at it this way: You've got two phrases you want to connect. You want to talk about this person having 十分な体力. But you want to express exactly what the 体力 is 十分 for. So you have this other phrase その山に登る. In order to connect those, you need to put something between them. だけ is one option, to mark that as the degree of "necessary strength" he has.
Quote:"He has only enough power to climb up the mountain"
Don't think of だけ as meaning "only" here. The Japanese sentence *does not* mean that he only has strength enough to climb that mountain, and no more.
The original meaning of たけ, in old Japanese, was "height" (a meaning that still bubbles up into modern Japanese every so often). From there, the meaning developed of "degree" or "amount", and then the meaning of "only" developed from there. Modern Japanese has both the "degree" and "only" meanings. "Only" is *not* the core meaning of the word despite the misleading information often presented in early textbooks and dictionaries (JSL is the only textbook I know of that gets this right).
In fact, sometimes だけ has the opposite meaning you would expect, especially in phrases like できるだけ or やれるだけ. Look at the examples from Eijiro:
やれるだけのことはやってみよう。
Let's try everything we can.
思ったようにうまくいかなかった時でも、やれるだけの努力をした後なら責めたりはしません。
If they were not as successful as they wanted to be, I never criticized them as long as they tried their hardest.〔【出典】Hiragana Times, 2000年10月号（株式会社ヤック企画）◆URLhttp://www.hiraganatimes.com/〕 全文表示
私はやれるだけのことはやった。
I have given it my best shot.
Note that in all those examples, the だけ represents the limit of effort, not a small "only" amount. やれるだけのことはやってみよう means that you're going to try really hard and do everything you can possibly do, *not* that you're only going to do what you can and no more. They mean similar things but the "only" in English often has a negative implication that だけ doesn't have.
Here are some other good Eijiro examples of だけの that can't really be expressed in English with "only".
（人）が必要とするだけの指導を与える
provide as much guidance as someone wants
（人）が必要と思うだけの期間滞在してもらう用意がある
be prepared to let someone stay as long as he deems necessary
（人）に～させるだけの説得力がある
be convincing enough to convince someone to
（人）のためにできるだけのことをする
do for someone as much as one can
10歳にして現在と同じだけの知性を有していたのだから」というのもある。
At the age of 10, he had already acquired the same level of intelligence as he has at present."〔【出典】日英対訳文・対応付けデータ（独立行政法人情報通信研究機構）2011年〕
「こちらの席は高いですよ」「結構ですよ。それだけの価値はありますから」
"You'll have to pay more for these seats." "I don't mind. It's worth it."
But, sometimes it does mean "only":
1カ月だけの予定で来たのに、結局9カ月も過ごしてしまったという人もいます。
"Sometimes they come for one month and stay for nine.
Edited: 2012-08-03, 5:23 am
I don't know of any download available...the explanations are quite complicated and in-depth, and unfortunately written rather opaquely in some places. I still feel like I don't fully understand them but I learn new things every time I have to teach it.
