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In 'All About Particles', I have come across the sentence

> 朝の台所は、コーヒーの香りがします。

which translates as

> The kitchen smells of coffee in the morning.

How do I interpret the phrase 朝の台所? I would normally translate it as "the
morning's kitchen", which doesn't make sense. With regards to the English
translation, why isn't the first part of the sentence 朝に台所は?
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-03-27T22:02:49.347
33163
2016-03-27T22:53:38.197
11479
question
particle-の
What does の in 朝の台所 mean?
In Japanese, you can often use possessors (well, genitive descriptors) where
in English we might expect a prepositional phrase with a little bit more
semantic content. This happens really quite a lot - take a look at these:

> 前の人 'the guy from before'
>
> 奥の部屋 'the room in/at the back'

Your specific example follows the same kind of pattern - the 台所 has something
to do with the morning; exactly what is left up to context. The translation
you're given isn't necessarily the best reflection of the structure; it might
be better as 'the kitchen in the morning smells like coffee', with 'in the
morning' directly modifying 'kitchen'.

A somewhat analogous construction in English might be 'the morning coffee' or
'the evening news' - it's not that the coffee belongs to the morning, it's
just coffee that you drink in the morning. An even more direct translation of
that sentence, then, might be 'the morning kitchen smells like coffee', though
that's certainly odder in English.
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-03-27T22:53:38.197
33168
2016-03-27T22:53:38.197
2020-06-17T08:18:27.500
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33163
answer