コーヒー、紅茶、あと、お茶もありますけど.
(There is coffee, black tea and also tea.)
What purpose do あと and けど serve in the above sentence? Is this a set phrase / sentence structure?
Coz I have only learned けど being used as conjunction to denote ‘but’.
Thanks in advance.
4 comments
I’ve never heard of it being a set phrase. けど is the casual version of が. You may have heard of uses like 質問ですが。where が is used to make the phrase more humble. It implies there is something holding the speaker back I guess like “I have a question (but I know I’m interrupting you)”. けど can be used similarly. I guess お茶 isn’t as good as コーヒー and 紅茶, so the けど implies that it’s “just” tea.
あと in this case is just like saying “and” or “and then” like “And then there’s tea too”.
In this context, あと means “更に(furthermore),” and けど makes a sound like seeing the listener’s reaction or response.
For example:
Person A: What kind of drinks do you have?
Person B: I have coffee and black tea… あと And also green tea けど (the nuance is like I wonder which one are they going choose?)
Think of this あと as “then”, and that けど as a mark of uncertainty. So the sentence becomes something like “There’s coffee, black tea, *then* there’s green tea too, *I guess*”
So a trailing けど is a common way to punt the conversation back to the person you’re speaking to. It’s sort of equivalent to tacking on an ellipsis to your sentence to elicit a response: I got X, Y, and Z….. (maybe you want one of these???)