Chapter 168A Glossed Passage from a Chitose Prose Tale
A continuous advice sentence from Shirasawa Nabe’s 1993 Pananpe–Penanpe performance, with four tiers and generic-person analysis.
168.1 A passage from a Chitose tale
Shirasawa Nabe, from Rankoshi in Chitose, told this version of the Pananpe and Penanpe fishing tale at her home on 23 May 1993. Nakagawa recorded it and publishes it as Text 3, N9305231UP. The comic story contrasts successful action with disastrous imitation; the selected sentence gives its concluding advice Nakagawa (2025: 147, 150, 159–160).
The full performance, including its Japanese asides and closing formula, appears on pages 159–160 of the published edition. Below, one complete sentence is presented in four tiers. The first retains the edition's romanization; segmentation, gloss, and English translation are supplied here.
168.2 Listen and watch before imitating
ikoysampa=an y_akka pirkano a=nu ka ki a=nukar ka ki wa orowa ikoysampa=an pe ne na.
‘Even when you imitate someone, you should listen carefully and watch carefully, and then imitate them.’
Nakagawa 2025: 160; Chitose, Text 3, N9305231UP, final advice sentence
The source's y_akka marks loss of the initial y. The normalized tier restores yakka; person boundaries follow the grammar's notation.
168.3 Person and the force of the advice
The intransitive ikoysampa takes fourth-person =an; transitive nu and nukar take a=. Nakagawa identifies this ending as advice with generic reference. English ‘you’ conveys that general application; it does not represent second-person morphology Nakagawa (2025: 150).
The preceding tale is predominantly in the third person. Its concluding fourth-person forms therefore do not make the whole performance a protagonist's first-person account. The broader distinctions are explained in Chapter 150 (Narrative Person and Reported Speech) and Chapter 67 (Fourth-Person Forms and Their Uses).
168.4 The linked predicates
The repeated ka ki joins listening and watching in parallel. Wa connects this pair with the following action, and orowa orders imitation after it. The literal concessive yakka introduces the situation to which the advice applies. The final pe ne gives the statement its normative reading in context. Compare the constructions in Chapter 101 (P and Pe: Participants, Content, and Clause Endings) and Chapter 147 (Connective Expressions in Discourse).