Re: Query: Boku desu sentence meaning.

On Sep 29, 7:14 am, Jim Breen <jimbr...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Nigel Greenwood wrote:
On Sep 17, 12:31 am, Jim Breen <jimbr...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
mirror wrote:
As Jay Rubin pointed out very elegantly when discussing
/ , does *not* mean "I am aneel."

I tried to contact JR, but he'd Gone Fishin'.

That was the first edition....

The sentence he discusses is closer to "Mine's an eel," isn't it? Or,
more prosaically, "I'll have eel".

Or several other alternatives. It all depended on the (unstated) subject.
The key thing is that was the *topic*, not the subject.

There's a similar example in Naoko Chino's excellent Basic Japanese
Sentence Patterns (p 89);

-- Kyoo wa nani o tabemashoo ka.

-- Soo desu ne. Watashi wa tempura desu ne. (Watashi wa tempura o
tabemasu.)

Nigel

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