64 THE POSTPOSITION.
MOTTE.
- '. 103. Motte, properly the gerund of the verb motsu, " to
hold," is in written Japanese the usual word for " by," "thereby." In the colloquial it survives only as a sort of emphatic particle, which is moreover little used except by pedantic speakers. Thus hanahada motte is the same as hanahada, "very," but emphasised; ima motte may be rendered by " even now" or by some such word as "very," thus :
Mukashi kara ima motte ( It is a shop which from, now indeed, h as carried on a good i ** ^e from old times ureru mse desii. Mown to this very
sells (intrans.) shop is. day.
N. B. Ai, the equivalent of our word "mutually," is often thus prefixed to verbs by pedantic speakers. It is a relic of the book language, and has little or no meaning now. This sentence is a good example of the apparent ambiguity of relative constructions in Japanese, as pointed out in p. 51. The speaker of course means to say that the things in the shop sell well ; but he seems to say that it is the shop itself which sells well.
After de, in the sense of "by" or "with," motte is commonly suffixed by all classes of speakers, thus :
Nawa de (motte) shibaru. To tie with a rope.
Rope by to- tie.
Kaze de (motte) to ga The door keeps wind by, door(nom.) slamming on account
ofthewfnd.
A r /. 104. I. The original sense of ni is "in," "into," "to":
