Does Kara have two meanings: since, because and from?


My dictionary shows kara twice:

[code]

    kara: from
    kara: since, because
    
[/code]

Is there a difference in the way these two are written or is there just one
meaning?




I'm going take a different tack on this from everyone else.

If you go back to earlier Indo-European languages such as Latin, but more so
like Sanskrit, you see a very similar use of the ablative case to express both
the idea of "from" and "because". There are still vestiges of this in English
when we say something along the lines of

> From what I've seen,....

which can easily be rephrased as

> Because of what I've seen,....

In Japanese, the difference in the meanings should be clear from context. If
から follows a noun, the most likely meaning is "from". If から follows a verb,
then it's most likely going to mean "because" unless it's follow the "te" form
of the verb, in which case, から will mean "after".

