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なんて言わないで自己申告制, meaning of で?

Japanese Language Asked by Wildmask on October 25, 2021

I’m kinda at a lost here. In what I’m translating (a song), a character says:

なんて言わないで

自己申告制

My main issue is…I have no clue how で is meant to be used here. One person I spoke to translated this as:

"Don’t say things like that."

A self-reporting system.

But with で, wouldn’t it be:

A self-reporting system [that requires/by means of] no talking.

However, the rest of the sentence after で has no verb, so I don’t think that would work either…there was no comma in the original line, so I don’t know if it’d be a conjunction, either (and if it were, wouldn’t 言わないで be 言わなくて?)

Sorry if the answer is actually simple, but I haven’t been able to figure this one out. Am I missing something?

2 Answers

ないで is the te-form of ない, but it can be a continuation marker (if it's in the middle of a sentence) or a request marker (if it's at the end of a sentence).

  • 見ないで!
    Don't look!
  • 見ないで答える
    To answer without looking

You seem to understand this. So the real question here is "Is there an imaginary period between 言わないで and 自己申告制"? However, no one can tell yes or no only from this short fragment of the lyrics. Even when a noun follows a te-form, it can still be part of a sentence, especially in lyrics (see this question for examples: Can te-form be used to modify a noun?). To answer a question like this, you need to access the entire lyrics and fully understand the context. So I googled for the original lyrics:

今日もココロがランアウト
現実だってシャットアウト
起きたらすぐにシットダウン
試しにファイティンポーズ
とってはみるけど
維持できないなら意味ないじゃん
なんて言わないで自己申告制
これでも頑張ってる「つもり」
やっぱりめんどくさい ムリみ〜

After reading this, the role of で still looked ambiguous to me, so I listened to this song on Spotify. My conclusion is that there is a period after 言わないで. That is, this 言わないで is a request ("don't say"), and 自己申告制 is associated with the next line. Here's my interpretation:

  • 「維持できないなら意味ないじゃん」なんて言わないで。
    Don't say "If you cannot maintain, it's meaningless".
  • 自己申告制(では)、これでも頑張ってる「つもり」。
    According to me, I'm doing my best.

Answered by naruto on October 25, 2021

言わないで is a negative command, "don't say."

Answered by Casey on October 25, 2021

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