Translation help, の & と troubles

[jbraswell]

Hi, again. I ran across this sentence in a reading in a textbook:

こうしたことは、需要と供給、生産と流通を中心とする今までの経済学では説明はむつかしい。

I translate this as

The aforementioned thing is difficult to explain by way of/in terms of economic study, which centers on supply and demand and production and distribution.

A few questions are plaguing me:

i) What's up with the expression 心中とする。 I found other examples of it on WWWJDIC, but I still don't understand its construction exactly. What is と doing there? I would make sense if it were　心中する, and 中心 were listed as a verb stem in the dictionary, but it's only listed as a noun. Are there other examples of this kind of construction?

ii) How can 今まで, which is an adverb, get followed by の? What roles is の playing?

Thanks in advance for tolerating my painfully minutiae-centered questions.

[Psy]

i) What's up with the expression 心中とする。 I found other examples of it on WWWJDIC, but I still don't understand its construction exactly. What is と doing there? I would make sense if it were　心中する, and 中心 were listed as a verb stem in the dictionary, but it's only listed as a noun. Are there other examples of this kind of construction?

The only other example of this type of construction I can think of is 必要とする, and, by and large, while there is likely some grammatical nuance behind this, it's probably better to think of it as a set expression. For the sake of conjecture, it does seem logical that 必要とする may have formed because 必要, meaning "necessary," matches very well with the suffix とする, usually translated as "as," but also meaning "is thought/decided as such." So maybe, moving to 中心とする, the とする is there to express that "production and distribution" are thought to be/decided to be central to the study of Economics. Just a guess.

ii) How can 今まで, which is an adverb, get followed by の? What roles is の playing?

Here it connects "up until now" to "Economics." So 今までの経済学 is "[the study of] Economics up until now/the modern study of Economics." Without the の there isn't a link and you'd be saying "up until now an explanation using the study of Economics is difficult." The other example of this kind of adverbial usage that comes to mind is 硫黄島からの手紙 "letters from Iwo Jima. It first it might not seem grammatically appropriate to do this, but の is used like this all the time.

At any rate, your translation seems spot-on from what I can tell. Hope I was able to clarify something. Corrections welcome.

[jbraswell]

Ah, good point about からの. I remember that construction rubbing me the wrong way initially as well.

OK, I can sleep better as long as know these look weird to other people and should just be accepted as single expressions, more or less. Thanks a lot for your help.