What's new

ます-stem v て-form

healer

Sempai
13 May 2019
687
10
28
寂しくても一台だけのジープに乗せられ、黒々とした林の中を通り過ぎていくのである。

How to choose between ます-stem and て-form when we pause in a sentence?

For examples 乗せられ above in preference to 乗せられて? I understand the -てform ALWAYS implies the actions of the verb in the -てform takes place before the following verbs? So do we use the ます-stem for the rest?

I'm not too sure with the following words.
もalso,no fewer than?
乗せられsuffering passive of 乗せる?
黒々こくこくor くろぐろ?
 
The meaning in this kind of simple conjunction usage is no different than if you used the て form, but the stem form has a more literary sound to it. It's just a question of tone. It's very commonly mixed with the literary である as here.

The て form must be used for grammars like ~ても、~てから、~ている、and so on.

も here is the grammatical particle, but the grammar ~ても has a meaning like "Even if ~".

It's difficult to tell with this little context what 乗せられ is doing, but at first glance it looks like a normal passive, "(subject) was given ride by the jeep".

In my dictionary, there is only one pronunciation for 黒々

 
simple conjunction usage is no different than if you used the てform
Can I say they are interchangeable in terms of meaning though the usage could be different? Is the て-form used more in daily conversation while the ます-stem is used more in reporting like articles in newspapers?

も here is the grammatical particle
I've found も is used quite often in the Japanese language for the meaning of "even", but often not translated into the English language. The given translation, please see below, does not mention the meaning of "even" or similar at all.

normal passive
The translation doesn't say he was given a ride. That was why I suspect a suffering passive.

only one pronunciation
That was what I found too. For some reason it says "kokukoku" in the given furigana.

Below is the reference:
寂しくても一台だけのジープに乗せられ、黒々とした林の中を通り過ぎていくのである。
Here I am in a lone jeep with the black mass of the foliage rushing by.
sabishikute mo ichidai dake no jiipu ni noserare,kokukoku to shita hayashi no naka o toorisugite iku no de aru.
 
Can I say they are interchangeable in terms of meaning though the usage could be different? Is the て-form used more in daily conversation while the ます-stem is used more in reporting like articles in newspapers?
Exactly.

寂しくても一台だけのジープに乗せられ、黒々とした林の中を通り過ぎていくのである。
Here I am in a lone jeep with the black mass of the foliage rushing by.
sabishikute mo ichidai dake no jiipu ni noserare,kokukoku to shita hayashi no naka o toorisugite iku no de aru.

This is not a literal translation at all.

The transliteration of 黒々 to 'kokukoku' is simply a mistake. Probably the dictionary being used for machine transliteration did not include the word 黒々 and the fallback strategy was to use the most-common ON reading for unknown kanji compounds.

This ~ても doesn't translate well to 'even if', but it is still a contrasting conjunction.

The translation looks like it was made with knowledge of the larger context, and most likely for ordinary readers and not for educational purposes.

Assuming that translation is in spirit correct, using it as a guide we can see that 乗せられ means that the speaker was given a ride by the jeep, a regular passive, not a suffering passive. The translation has reversed the verb, not 'being given a ride in' but 'am in' (= 'am riding in').

If I were to be very literal, I would say "Although it is lonely, I am being given a ride in the solitary jeep, passing through the middle of the pitch black woods."

This is not the sort of sentence you'd want to put into a professional translation of a story, of course, but it preserves as much of the original grammar through translation as I can reasonably manage.

A lot of example sentences out there have been taken out of their original context in a larger work. You'll find that they often have very mismatched grammar because the most literal translation does not sound good in the target language, and also you'll find that the English often includes things that are simply not in the Japanese at all, but rather are inferred from a context where the translator had that information from earlier sentences.

In this case the only 'extra' information is that the subject is the speaker and that the jeep is moving quickly ('rushing'), but you'll most likely come across examples where tremendous amounts of information are in the English that aren't in the Japanese because they are being inferred from a previous sentence. The context-sensitive nature of Japanese isn't the only cause, either -- in either translation direction, entire descriptive clauses can move from one sentence to a nearby sentence for purposes of making a smooth, natural translation.

For these reasons, it's important to be cautious of reading too much into out-of-context translations that were taken from outside material. Sentence constructed specifically for educational purposes are likely to be better behaved, but even then, there are often omitted subjects in the Japanese that are included in the English translation.
 
This is a good example about reliability of resources in internet. You can use them for reference, but it's often not useful to understand the given translation as the only one correct literal translation. As Chris-san explained excellently, even if the example Japanese sentence is quoted from a really existed manga, anime, blog or the like, as the writer of the site wrote, it's often non-sense to interpret a single sentence without the background context.
 
Thanks for all the advices. Even though that is an educational web site supposedly helps us with learning the Japanese language I have made allowance for possible mistakes, but I would need you all to help me verify in case it is my inadequacy.
Thanks again!
 
Back
Top Bottom