(no subject)

[which_chick]

坊やがかんしゃくを起こして、コーンフレークを皿ごと壁に投げつけている最中だったからだ。



Because his temper was up, the little boy was in the middle of throwing his bowl of cornflakes at the wall. I have taken great liberties with both the diagram and the translation. I suck. Elements of suckitude... How do I suck? Let me count the ways...

1. I do not really know what 皿ごと is doing there. I know that コーンフレーク is the direct object, but I really don't have a clue for what to do with 皿ごと. It might be "Cornflakes and then the bowl" but English-speaking folks know to call that "a bowl of cornflakes" because cornflakes, by themselves, are entirely un-aerodynamic and even toddlers know this.

2. I'm sort of not sure what to do with the whole mess of verbiage at the end. だったからだ may not really assort as I have diagrammed it and I really shouldn't leave big honking parts of sentence floating in midair like they belong there. I'm not sure that だったから is a subordinating conjunction, anyway.

3. While から has a "because" or "since" implication, I am in no way certain that I have applied it to the correct part of the sentence. I *think* I have, but that's only because nobody ever gets into a fit of pique BECAUSE he or she has thrown cornflakes. It's pretty much guaranteed that if there is cornflake throwing going on, the fit of temper happened first and the cornflakes are a consequence of that circumstance, not a cause of it.

In other news, red clover is pretty damn lovely in the morning with dew on it. And now, since I've abused Harry Potter enough for one day and given you some eye candy to boot, I'm going to spend quality time drooling on my copy of Damselflies of the Northeast by Ed Lam. It's gorgeous, inclusive, well-illustrated, and a hell of a deal for twenty bucks plus shipping. All of this is assuming, of course, that you have some need to understand the Zygoptera in that region of the world.

Comments

[ex-oki86.livejournal.com]

I hope this helps answers some of your question.
As far as my understanding...

1) saragoto meaning the whole entire dish including the dish.
Sara being the kanji quite literally translating to dish... goto being kind of an adverb/adjective(?) Now that I'm thinking of it... I'm not even sure if there's an easy English equivalent, however, I think "entire" as an adverb/adjective would suffice to fit what you're trying to do. As in "...throwing his entire bowl of cornflakes..."

2) ... I dunno... I forgot my grammar structure diagram to that point and extent...

3) Datakara is like... "Because of that happened, this occurs" type connotation... So you're quite right.

Hrm, I find this rather intriguing and educational. I never really thought of the grammar structure of Japanese until now.

I don't know if you knew this, but there's two communities that talk about Japanese as a language. One is correctjapanese and the other is japanese. I think CorrectJapanese would more suite what you're aiming for. :)