3.2. FURTHER INFLECTIONS 99
English sentence:
”(The) birds are singing, (the) flowers are blooming; spring has ar-
rived.”For added emphasis, we can place a Japanese comma after each of
the conjoined sentences:
While not really required, adding a comma can make a sentence
easier to read. When translating this kind of conjoined sentence, one can
usually either use a comma, or the conjunction word ”and”. However, it
should be noted that the real meaning is just a comma or a semi-colon:
since this construction creates a sentence where the second part of the full
sentence is merely a continuation of a story started in the first part, there
is no real ”and” to speak of. Typically in English the word ”and” will look
like it belongs there, but you must remember that the Japanese sentence
only faintly implies it. As such the following translations are all possible,
but not all of them sound like natural English.
”(The) birds are singing, (the) flowers are blooming; spring has ar-
rived.””(The) birds are singing and (the) flowers are blooming; spring has
arrived.””(The) birds are singing, (the) flowers are blooming and spring has
arrived.””(The) birds are singing and (the) flowers are blooming and spring
has arrived.”A further note on translating ”and”: even though a Japanese con-
junction can be translated to ”and”, going the other way around – from
English to Japanese – typically does not translate back to this con-
struction. The reason for this is that conjunction is a very specific thing,
whereas the word ”and” performs many roles in English: