Confused by the use of という in this sentence

5 comments

1. I’m not 100% but i believe you could generally translate it to “that means”.

2. In my mind it sounds like ” the more people heavily gender-dress, the more I’m reminded of the beings without gender (who wear it), as if they were inside an armour like shell, and I wonder whether they’re really suffering or of they’re simply like me, in other words, if they’re just that (= if they’re just the empty shell they’re putting on or if they’re people who are really concerned about gender).
   That という to me is a shortened ということ

3. If you want to understand this particular meaning, then it’s basically like person saying “I have a feeling like this, this and this”, and then all these instances are combined into a single idea to continue, basically to say ただそれだけだったのだ

   But if you want to understand という in depth, then you need to know what is abstraction. Overall things exist kinda in 2 planes, our real/physical world and our thinking, ideas about it. If something is purely theoretical, then it exist only in our minds, while on the other hand something like perception is possible only with real life objects. In a lot of situations we have both. Word like “flower” can mean specific physical flower, but it can also mean the idea itself, what flower is. For example, look at something like 酒場に行きましょう. Depending on context, people can have mutual understanding and then 酒場 is a specific bar, but it can also mean any bar. This particular usage is quite similar to a/the in English. But what if we mean specific bar, at the same time we think that person might not understand us correctly. What to do in such case? We can say something like ジョンという酒場 and such thing is possible with many words. If we think that something is too abstract, we can always specify it via such という.

   This is what happens here. Person has specific idea to express, but there is no specific individual word for it, like there is no way to directly transfer all it’s feelings, so we have to describe it first, so people would be able to understand us, and only then we can continue. This is what という does, we can describe something abstract via more specific cases.

4. First, there is no strict rule to put Japanese commas. In my case, I would put it into some places I want to pause for breathing I feel comfortable when I am reading it. So I think the writer put those commas there because of the same reason. This is just my opinion.

    

   Next, the part “自分と一緒にのではないか” sounds unnatural to me. If it is correct, then it can be interpreted as having several nuances. I guess it should be 自分と一緒なのではないか.

    

   Then, という refers to all sentences before it.

    

   Last, below is my poor literal translation.

   I was having a feeling that the more a person who thickly wears “gender” the more lets themselves imagine something that doesn’t have the concept of gender that is in their heavy heart shell in their mind and the truth is that they may be suffering and also it may be the same of my case. I now noticed that was just it purely if I look back.

5. Correction: 自分と一緒にの -> 自分と一緒なの

   “The more heavily one wears their gender, the more it evokes the image of a being without any gender in a heavy armor-like shell, and I harbored such thoughts as ‘Are they not in pain in actuality?’ ‘Are they not the same as me?’; that’s all it was.”

   The first という modifies 思い, the second という abstractly nominalizes the preceding phrase (turns it into a noun), and then それ refers back to it.

   という doesn’t normally nominalize things per-se, but it’s become a habit of speech to end a sentence in という to mean something more vague than という感じ or というやつ, similar to ending a sentence in 的な. In that sense I believe it’s nominalization.