1.8. CONTEXT LANGUAGE 47
the following manner:
A: ”You haven’t seen my cup, have you?”
B: ”No, I haven’t seen it.”
A: ”That’s odd. I just had it a moment ago.”
B: ”Perhaps you left it on the table in the living room?”
A: ”Ah! That might be.”In this translation there are a number of contextual simplifications:
”you” has been used to refer to a specific person, ”it” has been used to con-
textually refer to the cup in question, and ”that” has been used by speaker
A to refer to what speaker B said. In Japanese, rather than using contextual
words like this, they are simply omiĴed entirely. If we do a literal transla-
tion to English, we see a rather different, context-heavy kind of conversa-
tion:
A: Haven’t seen my cup?
B: Indeed, haven’t seen.
A: Odd... had just a moment ago.
B: Could be left on living room table?
A: Ah! Might be.It’s not just ”it” and ”that” which are omiĴed, even personal pro-
nouns are typically left out. This makes for a seemingly very ”sparse”
kind of language, which can be hard to interpret, especially when one is
just starting out with the language. For this reason, some textbooks and
courses will present Japanese sentences with all the contextual informa-
tion in them – while this does not violate Japanese grammar, it does lead
to highly artificial sentences, existing only in textbooks rather than reflect-
ing the language as it is actually used. Because of this, all the examples in
this book will try to use ”natural” Japanese phrases, with contextual words
required for the sentence to make sense in translation added in parenthe-
ses. For instance:
A: okashii wa. tsui sakki made moĴetandakedo.
A: (That’s) odd. (I) just had (it) (a) moment ago.And with that, we are finally able to move on from introductory text
to the language itself: let’s sink our teeth in some grammar!