What is the best way to formulate a natural equivalent in Japanese?
From my experience, the most common way seems to be contextual inference. Pronoun dropping is obviously super common, but whether or not that is a way to do doesn't interest me; what is the most natural way to say something like:
one must eat to survive
and retain the information that relates to an unspecified person (explicity). So for a second let's imagine that it was translated:
生き延びるために、食べなきゃ
The problem with that for me is that it loses the meaning in the English that relates to in-specificity. Even 誰か to me seems pretty different, e.g.
生き延びるために、誰か食べなきゃ
Like, how weird does it sound to say "someone must eat to survive" - not really at all an equivalent. Ok ok, apples and oranges to a degree, but if you think about the difference: one refers to someone whether or not they exist, in a sort of timeless semantic space. Whereas somebody has an immediacy that has a much more localized sense of time belonging to its usage and connotation.
Does 誰か have a similar sense of immediacy in this sense? Can I use どれか to refer to people in this situation?
Thanks !
what is the most natural way to say something like
andPronoun dropping is obviously super common, but whether or not that is a way to do doesn't interest me.
kind of incompatible with each other? I can't help but wonder whether there is really any meaning lost by dropping a generic pronoun, in a language that doesn't require a subject - the most natural way might be to drop the subject. If you use 人は...なければなりません - that is not as generic as in English, eg. when a Vulcan wants to talk about the necessarity of eating. – blutorange Jan 30 '15 at 20:43