186 CHAPTER 4. PARTICLES
- Cause
This is essentially the continuative form for , and means ”it is that
...” as unfinished sentence, which is in English typically translated as ”due
to”. There is an important distinction between ”due to” and ”because” that
deserves some special aĴention: ”due to” typically cannot be used to indi-
cate things such as explainingvolitionalaction (I am doing this because...),
reasons for requests (I would like ... because), personal opinions (I like it ...
because), commands (do ... because), and invitations/suggestion (would
you like to ... because). The same holds for : it cannot be used for any
of these.
You’d almost forget there are other things beside these categories,
but the most fundamental one, stating fact, is still there and is exactly what
this particle is used for:
”Due to it being a holiday today, the shop is closed.””Due to it being broken, (you) will (have to) use another one.”Because of the fact that this particle can only be used for factoids,
and cannot be used to express one’s own opinion, volition or suggestions,
it is considered more polite than the next particle, , which acts as a gen-
eral ”because”. is used frequently in official documents and formal
seĴings, where stating something as something other than a factoid might
lay responsibility for the statement with someone.
- Temporal, spacial or reasoning origin
The broadest definition that can be given for is that it signifies the
origin of anything, be it space related (starting from some point), time
(starting at some time), events (starting from the moment after you under-
take a particular action), or even reasoning (making an argument that is
grounded in a particular perspective). Because of this, it’s a very versatile
particle. To see this versatility, let’s look at several examples to illustrate