To my understanding all particles affect the word or clause that appears
before them: 「駅から家まで行く。」 means "I'll go from the station to my house" rather
than "I'll go the station from house to go". So if this logic applies,
shouldn't it also be true for 「から」 and 「ので」? 「私は忙しいから行けません。」 To my
understanding, here 「から」 is connected to the first clause and not to the
second one. So the sentence is worded similarly to: "because I'm busy, I can't
go." When Japanese doesn't need a comma between the clauses because they're
already connected together by 「から」. If it was connected to the second clause
instead of the first one it's meaning would become more of a "so". Also the
literal meaning of "from" for 「から」 and "in of" for 「ので」 is much closer to
"because" than "so". Is my understanding correct?
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2020-01-03T11:54:23.737
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2021-02-27T03:03:55.340
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question
particles relative-clauses particle-から japanese-to-english
Aren't 「から」 and 「ので」 closer to the meaning of "because" rather than "so"?
Your understanding is correct. The words 「から」 and 「ので」 effectively function
like particles.
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2020-01-03T15:11:25.860
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2020-01-03T15:11:25.860
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answer
It is your choice what to want to keeep and what you want to lose when you
translate from one language to another.

If you seek an English equivalent of ので, you cannot preserve both the ordering
of clauses and the position of pauses.

If you privilege the ordering of clauses, than "so" or "therefore" will be
preferrable, because they come after the causal clause, and before the
statement of its consequence.

The price for this, though, is that you have to pause before the conjunctive
particle, as is not done in Japanese. Moreover, you lose the hierarchy of the
sentence structure by turning hypotaxis into parataxis.

If you privilege the position of pauses instead, and if you want to keep
clause subordination as such, you should use "because", "since", which cluster
with the causal clause as ので does. This way you are also preserving the
hypotactic structure.

Same with から、and with a lot of Japanese particles. For example のに, which has a
concessive meaning but structurally works in the same way, and can prompt
similar doubts as to whether you should translate it with "but" or "although".
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2020-02-03T01:19:19.397
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answer