"scary fairy tale" grammar

[metablue]

I'm having trouble with a line in Lower Intermediate #1 - Scary Fairy Tale.

もしだらかがあかなめがそうじしたふろにはいったら、おもいびょうきにかかるんだよ。

1. This もし means "if, in case, supposing", right? Why is there a もし as well as a -たら? If you dropped either one, would you still have an if-then?

2. How can you tell that "あかなめがそうじしたふろ" means "the bath that the akaname has cleaned"? Is there a dropped particle between "あかなめがそうじした" and "ふろ"? I think I'd expect a "の" in there.

[attwad]

Don't know if i can help you with the second one but if I believe I can with the 1st one:

もし　acts like a reinforcement in the incertainty of the phrase.

There's this phrase which is used all the time by Japanese speakers:
もしよかったら。。。 which litteraly means "if you would like... then..."
but in a more formal way, or if you're pretty sure the answer will be "yes" then you can drop the もし and go on with just the よかったら.

Hope this helped

[Jason]

2. How can you tell that "あかなめがそうじしたふろ" means "the bath that the akaname has cleaned"? Is there a dropped particle between "あかなめがそうじした" and "ふろ"? I think I'd expect a "の" in there.

掃除した is a verb, so there's no need for の before 風呂. 掃除した風呂 is a relative clause.

[metablue]

Thanks attwad-san and Jason-san, that helps a lot.

re #2, I looked up "relative clause" on Wikipedia, and they say this:

"In other languages, relative clauses may be marked in different ways: they may be introduced by a special class of conjunctions called relativizers; ..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_clause

Is there something in the sentence's grammar that marks this as a relative clause?

[metablue]

Oh LOL. All I had to do was scroll down that wikipedia page.

"Japanese does not employ relative pronouns to relate relative clauses to their antecedents. Instead, the relative clause directly modifies the noun phrase, occupying the same syntactic space as an adjective (before the noun phrase)."

So it's just word order. I wouldn't have expected that.

[Javizy]

もし is pretty much redundant, grammatically speaking, but it gives the listener an idea of how the sentence is going to end. There are a few other patterns similar to this, such as, たとえ (which means 'even if'), at the start of a ～ても, or ～たところで clause, which both mean 'even if'. I suppose this is a result of having verbs at the end of the sentence.

As for the second point, Japanese conveys relative clauses by taking the noun and modifying it with a descriptive phrase, since there are no relative pronouns (that, which, who, etc). So, you take the modifying phrase (in this case, 'akaname has cleaned'), and attach it before the noun (bath). It's a bit confusing at first, but if you think of it like 'the-cleaned-by-akaname bath', it's closer to the Japanese way.

Simply, if you see a phrase ending in a plain-form verb directly before a noun, it's describing that noun. However, regular modifiers, such as adjectives and nouns+の, can also come before the noun, so it definitely takes a bit of getting used to.