What does いました mean when used by itself? From Mario RPG (includes picture)


Mario and Mallow are talking to a little mushroom guy and first, he says
"Mario! Mario!". Then he follows up with the text box shown here.

>
> [![](https://i.stack.imgur.com/FXYwG.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/FXYwG.jpg)
>
> いました、いました！  
>  あやしい やつが！  
>  たった今 ここをとおっていきました！

The context is a bad crocodile is going around town causing trouble and the
little mushroom guy just saw him.

I know いました to be kind of like 'was' and 'were' when combined with other words
but when used on its own, it doesn't make much sense to me.

What does it mean?




The verb いる (“to exist” or “to be”) requires a subject and optionally accepts
a location.

In the case of Japanese such elements can be omitted in the surface sentence
but they are inferred. So understanding this sentence requires understanding
what to fill in those two slots.

In this case, subject = He/She/It (aka クロコ/Croco) , location = Here

So “He was here”.

“Just” is also sort of implied, so “He was just here”.

Btw if you the read the next sentence 怪しいやつが, that’s actually providing the
subject for the first sentence (it’s inverted, aka a piece of grammar called
倒置法).

So you could say

“He was just here! That suspicious guy!” (maintain the inversion) or “That
suspicious guy was just here!” (collapse the inversion).

And finally, in English it’s probably slightly more common to say “I just saw
that suspicious guy”, or probably better for this context, “That suspicious
guy! I just saw him!!” or something like that. The best translation (including
whether you use “a” or “that”) would depend on the exact context which I don’t
remember (it’s been a good two decades since I’ve played this game :)).




The verb いる (“to exist” or “to be”) requires a subject and optionally accepts
a location.

In the case of Japanese such elements can be omitted in the surface sentence
but they are inferred. So understanding this sentence requires understanding
what to fill in those two slots.

In this case, subject = He/She/It (aka クロコ/Croco) , location = Here

So “He was here”.

“Just” is also sort of implied, so “He was just here”.

Btw if you the read the next sentence 怪しいやつが, that’s actually providing the
subject for the first sentence (it’s inverted, aka a piece of grammar called
倒置法).

So you could say

“He was just here! That suspicious guy!” (maintain the inversion) or “That
suspicious guy was just here!” (collapse the inversion).

And finally, in English it’s probably slightly more common to say “I just saw
that suspicious guy”, or probably better for this context, “That suspicious
guy! I just saw him!!” or something like that. The best translation (including
whether you use “a” or “that”) would depend on the exact context which I don’t
remember (it’s been a good two decades since I’ve played this game :)).

