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nanikuokanaa ("I wonder what to eat")

kefkaboo2003

後輩
24 Jan 2009
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Hello everyone,

I'm lately translating a manga (for personal practice, though it's really hard for me) and I found the following sentence:

"何食おかなあ。" "nani kuokanaa"

I actually know vaguely the meaning of this sentence. It says something like "I wonder what to eat". So I don't need a translation. But I'd like you to give me a grammatical explanation about this sentence, specially about the syntactic/morphological role of the "o". Is the "o" a part of the verb or not? I know that "kanaa" is a particle that means "I wonder". The verb is "kuu" (to eat). But I want to know what is the "o" doing there.

Please answer me. (I'm not quite sure if my English is good or not, so if you find any mistake, please let me know)
 
I thought the same thing when I first read it, the O is mistakenly there. But, seeing that there's an extra A at the end, I would assume that it's just an exaggeration of the oral pronounciation. Yeah, that's probably it. You're right.

Mauricio
 
That's the contraction of the volutional form 食おう.

何食おうかなあ

And it sometimes pronounced also as 何食おっかなあ in colloquial expressions.

Today is a "volutional" day?😌
 
Thank you guys for the answers! I feel much better now... for five days I looked for these explanations everywhere (the web and some grammar books I found here and there), but I found nothing.

Thank you so much again.
 
kefkaboo2003

The explanation given by Toritoribe is correct, but I thought I would give a little more detail.

the おう roughly translates as, "Let's...."

taberu = to eat
kuu = to eat

tabeyou = Let's eat.
kuou = Let's eat.

The interesting thing about tabeyou or kuou is that it can be used to refer to the actions of one person, two people etc., while the English "Let's...." only refers to two people or more. In Japanese, I can say, "Let's eat," when I am referring to only myself.
 
Last edited:
for five days I looked for these explanations everywhere (the web and some grammar books I found here and there), but I found nothing.
Have a look to this document. You can download it legally for free.
You will find everything about Japanese language in perfect Spanish.
You will see in the page 47 about volutional form (forma volitiva) おう。
That document is a free treasure for Spanish speakers. 🙂
http://lsi.ugr.es/~gunkan/html/gunkan_apendice/gunkan_nihongo_apendice_006.html
 
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