This is a mobile optimized page that loads fast, if you want to load the real page, click this text.

confused about grammar from different dialect

yellowjello

先輩
Joined
17 Aug 2011
Messages
47
Reaction score
0
I was reading some manga and I came across this sentence which I am having some trouble understanding.

aho mitai ni nomiyagatte...
mata nugidasun jyanee ka to omou to kutta ki senkatta wa.

So the speaker just left a restaurant with a girl and the girl seems to be a bit drunk. i am not sure what dialect the speaker is speaking in so i tried looking up what sen meant in kansai as a start.

So far I can translate the above sentence as: "You drank like an *****...When I thought you were going to take off your clothes again..."

I am having trouble with the 食った気せんかった part. i know kutta is the past form of "to eat". it seems like sen in kansai is equivalent to shinai. but i'm not sure what "kutta ki shinakatta" is supposed to mean in that case. my only guess is that it means "didn't feel like eating" but it doesn't really match the translation i found which said "You drank like an *****...When I thought you were going to take off your clothes again you just ate instead."

Any help understanding this last bit would be greatly appreicated.
 
Your interpretation is correct. 食った気せんかった is a Kansai equevalent of Standard Japanese 食った気(が)しなかった. 思うと is more close to 思ったから here, so he said "I thought you were going to take off your clothes again, so I felt as if I didn't eat".
 
thanks for replying!

actually, i recall another post of mine on this forum where i was reading Bleach. I also came across the word "sen" in the phrase "sen to" and I was told that it was the equivalent of "shiyou to". So does "sen" have 2 different meanings?

the sentence was:
hitokake dake chiri ni sen to aizen taichou no shinzoun naka ni nokoshitekita ndesu.

so what is the difference between the "sen" used here and the "sen" used above in senkatta?
 
1. 食った気が"せん"かった
2. ひとかけだけちりに"せん"と

In both cases, "せ" is the infinitive form (未然形) of the auxilirary verb "す", which is an old-fashioned verb equivalent to "する".
The difference lies in the auxiliary verb "ん".
The former "ん" is transformed from "ぬ", which means "ない" in rather older Japanese. "せぬ" is occasionally used as modern Japanese and it means "しない".
The latter "ん" is a variant of "む", which is an old Japanese verb indicating owns will or supposition.
 
(食うた気)せん and (食うた気)せんかった are different. せんかった should be considerd as one word. This is a relatively new dialect, being made by merging せなんだ and しなかった.

新方言 - Wikipedia

せ in せなんだ is the same as せ in せんと, as already pointed out. (Er, I'm not going to nitpick, but this す is a (classical) verb, not an auxiliary verb, and む is an (classical) auxiliary verb, not a verb.;-))

The etymology of ~なんだ is unknown. A hypothesis is that it's a variation of ~ぬあった, i.e., ぬ(the conclusive form of a classical negative auxiliary verb ぬ) + あった(the past form of あり/ある). ~なんだ used to be used until the late Edo period. It was replaced by ~なかった in the end of Edo period in Kanto erea, but still remains in Western Japanese dialects.

Also, I just realized that the OP's initial translation "didn't feel like eating" would be from the confusion with 食気せんかった/しなかった.
 
Last edited:
thank you both for the informative posts!

So what I'm wondering is how to distinguish "sen" where n corresponds to nai and "sen" where n corresponds to mu. I suppose it is just a matter of reading the context, but are there ever sentences where both interpretations actually make sense and there is ambituity in which auxiliary verb is used? for example, "shinai to" and "shiyou to" are occurring grammatical structures which both correspond to "sen to".
 
In Classical Japanese, indeed it's neccesary to pay attention which ん is used when translating(confusingly, there are few more ん other than those two), since the context is often the key of the interpretation. However, in Modern Japanese, you can consider that ん is Western Japanese dialect of ない in most cases. ん for volition or presumption is rare except being used in idiomatic usages. (In other words, you happened to come across a rare case ひとかけの塵にせんと. This is rather classical expression.)
 
I see. I'll keep that in mind as I read through other material as well. thanks!
 
Cookies are required to use this site. You must accept them to continue using the site. Learn more…