お母さんは、かわいそうだからといって、花子たちのなかへその鳥を入れてやりました。


Is mother putting the new chicken with Hanako because the new chicken "seems
cute" is "poor and pitiable" or because the family is poor.




First of all, かわいそう, means pitiable, in the sense that one feels sorry for
someone/something. It has nothing to do with being poor, as in the opposite of
affluent (of course, one might feel sorry for someone that has a lack of
money, but this is not the case here). For poor in this sense one would use
the word 貧乏｛びんぼう｝.

It does not mean "cute" either, for this one would use e.g. かわいい. Now, both
かわいい and かわいそう have the same origin, in old Japanese 顔映｛かほは｝ゆし→かはゆし→かわいい

The original term meant something like, "unable to face it", and had the
meaning of the term 気｛き｝の毒｛どく｝, (pitiful, miserable, when you feel sorry for
someone). かわいい thus originally had this meaning, but it was slowly changed to
mean "cute" instead. As the mening of pitiful disappeared, the suffix そう was
added and the old meaning of 気の毒 came back in this new form.

Thus, かわいい and かわいそう are strongly related to each other, but nowadays they
have very different meaning.

Now, the question is, who does mother think we should feel sorry for? The bird
or Hanako-tachi? Strictly speaking we cannot know from this sentence alone.
This is very common in Japanese, that certain components of a sentence are to
be understood from the context. My feeling reading the sentence above would be
that we feel sorry for the bird, and thus gives it to Hanako-tachi so that
they can care for it. But given a certain context, one could very well imagine
that we are feeling sorry for Hanako-tachi (maybe all the other children
around them got their own birds), so we give this bird to Hanako.

