I'm back with another question after so long!
Sorry I was gone, I know y'all miss me
(sorry for not using kanji very much, I just didn't feel like switching back and forth between Japanese and English output!)
I can't help notice some really odd things about Japanese's transitivity pairs like
deru/dasu,
tsuku/tsukeru ochiru/otosu,
hajimaru/hajimeru, etc. So, firstly, there appear to be several classes of these:
(intransitive/transitive)
1: -eru/-asu
2: -u/-eru
3: -iru/osu
4: -aru/-eru
(well these were the various classes I could discern from the lesson on transitivity pairs in Tae Kim's Learning Japanese.
Apparently there are a LOT more classes! Granted, many of them look like variations of the above: -eru/-yasu for instance is near-identical to Class 1 and appears to be a variant of it when the root ends in a vowel:
fueru/fuyasu,
hieru/hiyasu, etc. Then we have the weird reversed ones like
hanareru/hanasu...come on, that is incredibly counter-intuitive. )
Now, a lot of the transitives--hell maybe all of them--can be viewed as causatives.
ochiru means "to fall", and
otosu means "to drop"--"drop" can easily be viewed as "make fall", likewise for
deru and
dasu "take out" is pretty much "make come out". However, these are not using the typical causative formations (except for class 1, somewhat, which I'll talk about later). The most unusual of these are class 2:
tsuku/tsukeru's class. The causative of
tsuku would be
tsukaseru (would this even make sense? Would someone ever actually say つかせる instead of つける?).
tsukeru looks identical to
tsuku in, of all things...the potential? Then again, there's not really much chance for confusion, since particles would leave it disambiguated:
電気をつける
denki wo tsukeru "(I) turn on the lights" (non-potential transitive)
電気がつける
denki ga tsukeru "the lights can turn on" (potential intransitive)
On a side note, others could be viewed as passives for the intransitive, such as tasukaru "to be saved", taskeru "to save"...man have I heard 助けて!! waaaay too many times in anime lol. Because of this "the man was saved would be 男は助かった otoko wa tasukatta and NOT 男は助けられた otoko wa tasukerareta, right? If I'm not incorrect, the second would usually be parsed as "the man could save" (I will never understand why the passive and potential of all things are conflated in ichidans. Like, what?). Man, I love the sound of -rareta, sounds so lovely especially when seiyuu say it!
To be fair, it does sound plausible for
tsukaseru to become
tsukeru--all that has to happen is chopping out the -as-, but you'd expect an actual CV mora to get cut out, not a VC sequence...then again, Japanese is weird. In addition, Class 3 don't fit this "cut down causative" theory, e.g
ochiru's causative would be
ochisaseru and I have no idea how that would become
otosu. Class 4 though works:
hajimaraseru >
hajimeru would be nearly the same process as
tsukaseru >
tsukeru since both intransitives are godan. Class 4 is only a separate class because of the unusual amount of transitivity pairs that are -
aru/-eru (if they were class 2 we would expect
-aru/-areru)
Then there's class 1. Tae Kim's Learning Japanese says that there's a shorter and more informal causative inflection that's -sasu for ichidan (
taberu "eat" >
tabesasu "make eat", cf. "proper"
tabesaseru) and -asu for godan (
iku "go" >
ikasu "make go", cf "proper"
ikaseru). Weirdly enough, for being a slangy casual inflection (I don't actually hear it all that often in anime, though you'd expect to hear it a lot there, especially when the characters are high-schoolers...Tae Kim says it's "mostly used in very rough slang, so is it more of a delinquent/gangster thing?), this looks a lot like Class 1, except the intransitive base is -eru as opposed to just -u.
In deru's case, given that its root is merely d-, perhaps once there was *du, from which dasu came from, then du became deru, much like Clawgrip's example of No wait, he explained this:
-dzu: They existed, but they call got turned into ichidan verbs. One of interest is idzu, which is the old form of 出る deru. For some reason, the initial i- was dropped, so idzu → *ideru → deru. Interestingly, the imperative retains the i in the weird but common form oide, which I'm sure appears frequently enough in anime, and means "come here".
So
idzu >
ideru >
deru. Therefore, presumably on the transitive side there was
idzu >
idasu >
dasu.
But this doesn't match up with -(s)asu being a slangy form of the causative inflection. Usually slang is new and sticks around for a limited time, or ends up becoming part of normal grammar if it's used to the point of normalization. This requires -(s)asu to be an old inflection which has somehow survived but only as a slang form. The one way I see it working is if -(s)asu was once the original, but then -(s)aseru took its place for unknown reasons (more distinct? Bolstered by other ichidan conjugations?), leaving -(s)asu to become slang. Though it is weird for old inflections to stick around alongside their new ones, but hey Japanese is fucking weird yo ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(as a side note, I really like the idea of slang
inflections, as opposed to just having slang words. Gotta steal this for Pazmat...)
...you know this isn't much of question. It's more a musing over some odd quirks...