Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-6192846-20150613141203/@comment-23.122.217.39-20150819230946

Servant of Evillious wrote:

By your own account, any native Japanese speaker would be approaching The Song She Kept Waiting For's title and assume it's "The Song I Kept Waiting For" until they actually listen to the song and can infer a possible another pronoun, whether that be "she" or "you" or whatever the context of the lyrics has them think, correct? Yes. That is the impression I get.

I'm not sure it's as flexible as you think it is, however. I mean we have sentences in English where if you cut off the latter half or removed it from context you get an entirely different meaning than you would if you had the whole thing as well. In my mind, the Japanese listener does not approach the song thinking "This could refer to multiple people but I'll go with first person for now". They think "This is in first person". And then adjust the assumption if the song contradicts it. I don't think they view it as a matter of interpreting things so much as very basic, snap judgements that almost every native speaker of the language will make by experience with how the language is used. The reason why we have to interpret is they don't often teach how to make those assumptions in classes or other learning areas. It seems more that subjects are only specified typically when another subject would be assumed otherwise. --From my experience.

The vagueness of subject is not something that I believe can be replicated in English--omitting subjects in this language suggests more to the reader/listener that the person writing the sentence either doesn't know who the subject is (as in, there is no subject), or that the subject is many people.

--That's about all I have on the matter. If this isn't terribly convincing then so be it--it's not a big enough point for me to start another translation argument on > >