(no subject)

The purpose of this livejournal is to give me a place where I can document (and possibly expand) my woeful grasp of Japanese by dissecting sentences from ハリー・ポッターと賢者の石, a novel which happens to be the only Japanese literature I have at my disposal. I will be dissecting these sentences by stuffing them into the latinate structures I haphazardly recall from seventh grade when Mrs. Thompson taught me to diagram English sentences according to the grammar of a dead language that bore English no particular goodwill. My hazy recollections will be supported by Understanding English Grammar, by Martha Kolln, third edition, a textbook leftover from when I was in college. (I got an A in the class.) If this is the sort of thing that might offend you because it's linguistically inappropriate, best to stop right now. Things are NOT going to get any better from here on out.

Basically, each meaningful entry here will have three parts:

1. the original sentence, typed out as it appears in the novel (and I'll be going in book order).
2. a graphic image of the diagrammed sentence, with lables and such
3. a brief discussion, including my best-guess translation.

I do not currently OWN an English-language copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone because my dad's wife's daughter made off with my copy two years ago at Christmas, so there will be no cheating on that front. I have read the book and I've seen the movie, but I don't have it here in front of me as I go about my lame-ass translations. Again, I am not good at this. I don't speak or read Japanese with anything like a reasonable level of fluency. I am not an expert. This is me, learning. I will make mistakes. That said, 始めましょうか？

プリベット通り四番地の住人ダーズリー夫妻は、「おかげさまで、私どもはどこからみてもまたもな人間です」と言うのが自慢だった。



This was a bit of a bitch. Nothing like starting off with a fumble, is there? My best guess for an English version: The residents at Number 4 Privet Drive, the Dursleys, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal people, thank god. I'm not sure I like the appositive there, but I couldn't figure out how else to do it. I'm reasonably pleased with how I parsed "と言うのが自慢だった", too. More literally, I kind of think "どこからみても" would be "however you looked at it" or "viewed from every perspective" but that doesn't read as well as "perfectly". I could probably diagram that phrase more fully if I wanted to, but I'm not going to do that today.