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「よう」exploration

Today I will talk about 「よう」.
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I had seen this suffix quite a few times scattered in all sorts of excerpts so I decided I would investigate this further in order to understand it.
Step 1:
First, I'll type the excerpt I'll use to study this:
チャゴスが 脱走しないように
ただいま 出入り口を封鎖して
見張っております。
Step 2:
Secondly I identify all the grammatical particles (助詞) and mark them a different color. That's three of them in that excerpt.
チャゴス 脱走しないよう
ただいま 出入り口封鎖して
見張っております。

Step 3:
Third of all, I translate the easiest part, the kanji. Since I have the furigana on hand, it's very easy to do with a dictionary. The harder part is figuring out certain words with multiple definitions since I don't have the context just yet.
脱走: escape
出入り口: exit and entrance

封鎖: blockade
見張: to stand watch
Simply with those words translated, I can already have a fairly good idea of what's being said.

Step 4:
Normally I would start focusing on the okurigana but this time around I'll stick with 「よう」. Just before we do, I need to understand that the しない makes "negative action" here (negative of する). So "not escape".
脱走しないよう
...this is the part of the text which interests me. Normally I'd try to keep the suffix as part of the whole excerpt but here I'm fairly certain that よう only modifies 脱走しない so I should be ok.
Normally I use my grammar dictionaries to understand things like these:
Basic Dictionary
Intermediate Dictionary
They're honestly great books. Great quality and explanations.
In this case, the basic dictionary didn't have anything about 「よう」but fortunately, the intermediate dictionary did, 2 entries to be precise.
Step 5:
I'm now going to overview both entries to see which one applies to my situation.
The first one:
"a noun-forming suffix which means a way (of doing something)"

It mentions that it's most commonly used with ga nai in negative sentences. Although the sentence I have in the excerpt *is* negative, it doesn't have ga nai here, not in the structure presented in the dictionary anyway:
この作文直しようがない。

The second one:
"an auxiliary verb that expresses the writer's conjecture about some potentiality or his certainty about a given state of affairs"
It doesn't seem like much of a stretch to think it applies here. Some English equivalent are provided: probably, likely, must be, should, ought, naturally
So perhaps something along the lines of: Changos (the name in katakana here) shouldn't escape..."
That's it for this entry!
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Zizka
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