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Lesson 87: Structure Inverted

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Today, I'm afraid I don't have any reindeer for you, but I do have a few deer.

We're going to talk about the word "shika", which, as you probably know, means "deer", but there's another "shika" element in Japanese which is a particle and which has a rather unusual effect on the structure of sentences.

So we're going to look into that effect.

One of my commenters reminded me of a rather charming Japanese word play: "nara nara shika shika shikararenai", and in natural English we would translate this as "In Nara, only the deer get scolded".

It's useful to know here that Nara in the Kansai region is famous for its deer.

People go to Nara to see the deer (and for other things -- it's a lovely historical city).

Strictly, "Nara nara" doesn't mean "in Nara".

It means "if it's Nara" or, more naturally, "in the case of Nara".

But what does the rest of the structure mean?

This is what my commenter was really asking.

The question was, "What is the A-car of this sentence? Does it have a zero-A-car somewhere, or does it even have an A-car at all?"

What is the A-car of a sentence like this?

Now, the problem is partly that "shika" has an unusual effect on the sentence structure, but it's also that the receptive helper is used here which makes it look a bit more complicated than it is.

So let's start off with a very simple "shika" sentence.

"Sakura shika inai."

In natural English we'd translate this as, "There's nobody here but Sakura."

So what's "shika" doing here?

"Shika" does two things in a sentence like this.

It knocks out the ga-particle just like "ka", so this isn't something that we're not already familiar with.

When you have "ka" in a sentence where there would also be a -ga,

we never say "ga ka" or "ka ga".

"Ka" displaces -ga, but the -ga is still logically there.

That's what "shika" also does.

But the other thing "shika" does is a little bit more unusual.

I don't know if you've ever used Photoshop, but in Photoshop you can invert a selection.

What happens is that you select an object, you press the key selection to invert that selection and what happens is that everything outside of that object is selected.

The object is the only thing there now that isn't selected.

This is exactly what "shika" does.

While -ga, you might say, selects an object, a noun, and marks it as the A-car, the subject of the sentence, "shika" selects that noun, inverts the selection and marks that as the A-car of the sentence.

So everything other than that selected noun is now the A-car of the sentence.

So, "Sakura shika inai" literally means "Everyone other than Sakura is not here".

In the deer sentence, which looks a little more complicated, it's exactly the same thing: "nara nara shika shika shikararenai" (if it's Nara, everything other than the deer are not scolded).

So again, we're selecting the deer, inverting the selection to everything other than the deer, and then that becomes the A-car of the sentence, which is "not scolded".

Now, there's also an implicit relevance clause in this, so when we say "Sakura shika inai" we don't mean there's nothing here but Sakura: no trees, no bushes, no flying saucers.

We mean there's nobody here but Sakura.

Now, the "inai" partly tells us that, but it isn't just that, because it also doesn't mean that there are no bunny rabbits here, there are no birds, there are no capybara (did I pronounce that right?)

So "shika" inverts the selection, but it's also what you might call a "smart invert": it selects for relevance.

However, in some "shika" sentences there is actually a ga-marked subject, so what's going on here?

Let's take a look at one. Suppose we say, "taoru-ga ichimai shika arismasen".

Again, in natural English: "There's only one towel here."

The ga-marked subject is "towel" or "towels".

In Japanese, of course, there's no distinction between those two things.

And as I explained in my lesson on counters, a counter in this kind of sentence is working as an adverb.

It's telling us more about the engine of the sentence, the verb.

So if we say "dorobou-ga san'nin iru", we're saying "robbers exist three-person-ly".

If we say "taoru-ga ichimai aru", we're saying "towel one-flat-thing-ly exists".

If we say "taoru-ga nimai aru", we're saying "taoru-ga two-flat-thing-ly exists".

So when we say "taoru-ga ichimai shika arismasen", the subject is "towels", then we have the counter "ichimai" and that is marked by "shika".

So we're selecting one flat thing, one towel, and then inverting the selection to all towels.

Not all flat things, because we've already marked the subject as "towel". So we're inverting the counter, which is working adverbially, from one towel to every towel but that one towel.

So we're saying "towels, everything but one, non-exists".

In natural English, "There's only one towel".

And that's how what we might call the inverse-selection structure of a "shika" sentence works.

And I should just add at the end that there is a use of "shika" that's more colloquial.

And this is when we say "shika nai".

Now, in an ordinary "shika" sentence obviously we just say "kono furui kuruma shika nai", which means in natural English "There's only this old car."

We're selecting the car, inverting the selection: "all cars other than this old car non-exist".

But we can also put that "shika nai" on the end of a logical clause or a verb standing in for a logical clause.

Now, this isn't strictly grammatical, but colloquially it often happens.

So if you hear in an anime somebody saying "nigeru shika nai!", they're saying "we gotta run!" in natural English.

What they're literally saying is, we take this "nigeru", we mark it with "shika" so that what we're selecting is not "nigeru" (run) but everything else other than run.

And again, the relevancy smart selection comes in here. What we're really saying is "every course of action other than running doesn't exist".

Well, of course it does exist, this is very colloquial, but as far as we're concerned it doesn't exist: there's nothing for it but to run.

In English we might say, "It's run or nothing", and again, that's ungrammatical and for the same reason that the Japanese is ungrammatical, that "run" isn't a noun.

But, when that thing's coming after you, who cares about grammar?