Meaning of 「逃げることないじゃん！」


My best guess at this point is that this means "you definitely can't escape".

The English translation (which I've learned to take with a grain of salt)
translates it as "Don't run off!"

In context, the addressee clearly is running away.

My understanding is that じゃん is a contraction of じゃない but has a meaning of its
own. This comes mainly from Tae Kim's guide here:

<http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar/slang>

Where he writes:

> Though derived from 「じゃない」, 「じゃん」 is always used to confirm the positive.
>
> ...
>
> Hopefully, you can see that 「じゃん」 is basically saying something along the
> lines of, “See, I’m right, aren’t I?”

The proposed “See, I’m right, aren’t I?” translation of じゃん doesn't seem to
fit very well here as far as translating this into a natural sounding English
translation, which gave me some doubt. But I'm thinking it can carry a sense
of "definitely" or "absolutely" instead. Grammatically, it's a rhetorical
question in Japanese, but it doesn't translate to a rhetorical question in
English.

Actually, writing this question made me more confident about this (and I
changed my mind half way through), but can anyone confirm?




I would translate it as "No need to run away, right?"

> Does the "no need" part come from ことない?

Yes.

> Can verb+ことない by itself have that meaning

I would say verb+ことない has the connotation "there's no need to + verb".

> the じゃん part, in addition to adding the "right?"

じゃん is a colloquialism for "ではないか” (= isn't it?.)

All in all I would utter the expression to convey that I am dissatisfied with
someone's escapism.




I would translate it as "No need to run away, right?"

> Does the "no need" part come from ことない?

Yes.

> Can verb+ことない by itself have that meaning

I would say verb+ことない has the connotation "there's no need to + verb".

> the じゃん part, in addition to adding the "right?"

じゃん is a colloquialism for "ではないか” (= isn't it?.)

All in all I would utter the expression to convey that I am dissatisfied with
someone's escapism.

