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No. 36714
[Edit]
Some questions/musings on the rakugo story in ep2 .
The punchline in ep2 is actually more clever than I thought at first. I briefly perused the original story [1] (by which I mean jumped to the end, since while I can puzzle through isolated sentences given unbounded time, I cannot do walls of JP text), and you have the original line from the poem:
>瀬を速み 岩にせかるる 滝川の
>われても末に 逢わんとぞ思う
>se wo haya mi iwa ni sekaruru takikawa no
>warete mo sue ni awan to zo omou
juxtaposed with the punchline
>割れても末に、買わんとぞ思う。
>warete mo sue ni, kawan to zo omou.
I guess my first question here is why "逢わんとぞ思う" means "[I] think we'll meet" even though "逢わん" could be read as a contraction of awanai. I see in [2] that there are two possible meanings for an ~n suffix:
>1. ない to ん
>The negative suffix nai ない is sometimes contracted to just n ん. For example:
Although interestingly wiktionary (an underrated gem for etymological exploration) [3] traces this use of ~n to a contraction of ~nu instead. One of the stackexchange answers also implies this is only done for godan verbs, which I can't find any authoritative reference for but makes sense since ichidan verbs with ~n doesn't roll of the tongue as easily since there isn't a consonant before the ~n.
>2. ぬ to ん
>The suffix ~nu ～ぬ contracts to n ん. Although this suffix is often negative like nai ない, it's not always negative
which just confuses me more, since it doesn't give any details on what conditions it's not actually negative. Wiktionary [4] has some notes here, but again that just leaves me more confused.
I think the answer might be in the Classical Japanese/Modern Japanese split though, since [5] states
>According to Classical Japanese rules, the negative ~ぬ is the 連体形 of ~ず. This means it is used to modify nouns. In particular, you cannot end a sentence with it, so that means that this ん cannot be an abbreviation of ~ぬ. In modern Japanese, the distinction between 連体形 and 終止形 has been lost, but in the past it mattered. I think a contracted ん in Classical Japanese is generally a contraction of ~む.
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Anyway that aside, I think punchline is more clever than I first thought since there's a double meaning. You have the literal meaning that the person will buy the mirror he broke, but also the hidden meaning from the paralleled structure that things will "fit together" in the end. CR subs only put in the second meaning, which allows the joke to make sense to a non-jp speaker and retains the parallel structure, but discards the literal meaning. B-global used the literal meaning, but that kills most of the joke.
I need to think more, there should surely be a way to translate this into english while retaining both parts. I tend to dislike when people say that things like this can't be translated, because more often than not they _can_, it just requires skills closer to poetry to bend language to your will. (As an example, in bocchi there was a kessoku band/kessaku pun. CR pigeonholed themselves by using "zip tie" which made the latter untranslatable, while BB used "cable tie" and followed up with impec-cable which was absolutely brilliant; don't think I could have come up with that because it didn't even occur to me to call it anything other than a zip tie).
If anyone has any suggestions here, would be interested to hear them. To translate to english we'll need a pair of words that sound similar (or even the same word) and mean meet/buy respectively.
[1] https://ameblo.jp/rakusyou-rakuraku/entry-10047816960.html
[2] https://www.japanesewithanime.com/2019/07/contractions.html
[3] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%82%93#Etymology_1
[4] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%AC
[5] https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/72064/verb-ending-in-%e3%82%93-with-positive-meaning?rq=1
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