# 人たちに食べてもらいます



## JoAnne van Heff

今年もこの庭でぶどうが出来て、ビルで働いている人たちに食べてもらいました。


does it mean that the people working in the building were given Graves or that they gave graves to someone else?


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## SoLaTiDoberman

JoAnne van Heff said:


> 今年もこの庭でぶどうが出来て、ビルで働いている人たちに食べてもらいました。
> 
> 
> does it mean that the people working in the building were given grapes or that they gave grapes to someone else?


"Graves" might be the plural form of "grave" (tomb).


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## frequency

Yes, that's right. Though it's unclear, some people or the owner of the building has been growing grapes. In this summer (as lately as you read this news report), they gave the grapes to other people working in the (same) building. You know that sentence has たち, so not to only one person.


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## JoAnne van Heff

So how would you translate it?


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## SoLaTiDoberman

JoAnne van Heff said:


> So how would you translate it?


 I think #3 already said it all.

This is my attempt:

_The owner company of that building started viticulture in the roof garden of that building in the center of Tokyo. They wanted to increase "greens" in Tokyo whose main color was "grey."_
_
"Also in this year, in this garden, grapes were vintaged and distributed among workers in that building to eat."
 or "... and they (the company that owns the building) let/made workers eat the grapes."_


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## ideys

The subject of もらいました is the company, right?
In that case, why not use 食べさせてもらいました？ to express the meaning of  let/made?


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## ideys

対岸の長浜の人に聞いたところ「島には観光客が来るようになってから、日中は家の中にひきこもっている人もいる」そうだ。
そしてこの猫島ブームに、若干、おいてけぼり感があるという。

I just saw a similar example, when there is a に, things become confusing.
Does it mean : 
the people across the sea feels left aside by the encomic boom of the cat island?
The subject in this case is people. And even so , the meaning is still a little obscure for me.
They are complaining about the boom has bad side effects , or about not sharing the benifits of the boom?


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## Flaminius

もらう itself is "to let someone do something."  You only need the _te_-form of a verb to complete the construction.  If you want to say "let someone eat," conjugate 食べる in its _te_-form, which is 食べて.

And we get 食べてもらう (> 食べてもらった).

There is another construction for making someone do something; one that uses _saseru_.  This is both making (forcibly) someone do something and giving permission to do something.  You used both constructions in 食べさせてもらう and it means, "they [the company] was allowed to eat."

Both constructions expresses the "someone" in "let/make/allow someone do" by marking the noun with _-ni_.  The construction can be analyzed like this:
N [N-ni V-te / V(adverbial)] saseru / morau
(Or these constructions use sentence embedding and mark the embedded subject with _-ni_.)


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## Flaminius

I don't understand your other question.  The _-ni_ in 長浜の人に聞く is not the marker of an embedded subject but the person who was interviewed.  If you still find it difficult to understand the sentence, please open a new thread.


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## ideys

Thanks a lot, I have to digest your answers for a while!
As for the second question , my fault , it is another ni after the cat island boom.


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## frequency

JoAnne van Heff said:


> ぶどうが出来て


Literally it says in Japanese "grapes were made/produced". Fruit, vegetable, etc が出来た means that a tree or the like has got ripe ones, like you think they are ready for being harvested. The grapes have fully grown. We say so.


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