JSLL #23 - Urashima Tarou - Twenty-third sentence

Let's find out what the princess said, part 1: sentence 23.

「さびしくなりますが、おうちにお帰りになりたいのは当然です。

「さびしくなりますが、おうちにおかえりになりたいのはとうぜんです。

"Sabishiku narimasu ga, o-uchi ni o-kaeri ni naritai no ha touzen desu.

(Note that I don't close the quotes, because this is just the start of the quotation.

These are two main clauses with the particle が (followed by a comma 、) to separate them. We've seen the particle が many times now, placed after a noun phrase to indicate the subject. But here, the が follows a complete clause, in which case the particle means something else. One way to translate it is with the word "but," but it's a bit milder than that. Another translation could be in the form of a semicolon. Let's find out what would work best in this case.

The first clause is short: さびしくなります. The first part, さびしく is the adverbial く-form of the i-adjective さびしい, meaning "lonely, lonesome, solitary, desolate." (Note that this adjective is normally written with a kanji: 寂しい). 

なります is "to become," and as we've seen earlier, it takes a く-form. The verb is in the polite non-past tense. Note that I say "non-past" and not "present." In English, using the present tense to refer to future events is possible, but not typical. For example, you could say, "I can't make it, I have a job interview tomorrow." But overall, you need the future tense. Japanese is different: this non-past tense can refer equally to the present or the future.

The princess doesn't mention a topic or subject. When someone is speaking, and no topic was established earlier, a rule of thumb to use is:

• The implied topic of a question without a topic or subject is often the listener.
• The implied topic of an assertion without a topic or subject is often the speaker.

So in this case, a decent translation of the first clause would be "I will be lonely, but..."

The second clause has a complex topic (marked by the topic particle は), which we'll discuss in a bit. Let's first look at the ending, 当然です。当然 is a no-adjective that means "natural, right, just, proper, reasonable, appropriate, deserved." So this clause is saying that something is natural or right.

おうちにお帰りになりたいの is the topic. We learned the ～たい verb ending previously, to be used only when referring to oneself. This that verb form, followed by の. Like the が particle, の is also a particle that can occur after a noun phrase or after a clause. After a noun phrase, it means 's (or "of" in reverse): 人の名前 means "the person's name" or "the name of the person." After a clause, like here, it acts as a nominalizer: it turns the clause into a noun phrase. We'll see how this translates in a minute. Let's first find out the clause.

The verb is お帰りになりたい. This is respectful speech: you can make a verb respectful by taking its ます-stem (in this case, なり from なります), prefixing it with お-, and adding the form of the verb なる that you normally had in mind for the actual verb. So 帰りたい ("want to return") becomes お帰りになりたい. Before that comes おうちに, which just means "home" with a respectful お- prefix. So the entire part before の just means "want to go back home." The の turns this clause into something you can use before "is natural." In this case, it would best be translated "To want to go back home is natural." Or, more liberally, "It's only natural that you want to go home."

So the whole sentence translates as: "I will be lonely, but it's natural that you want to go home."

We'll see what else Princess Oto has to say in the next post.