Questions about Japanese

Discussion of natural languages, or language in general.
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clawgrip
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Re: Questions about Japanese

Post by clawgrip »

Check out this excerpt I took from a newspaper from 1885. It has no small letters and uses hentaigana liberally:

Image

That is: 國安を害するものあらば處するに國典を以て
written out in contemporary hiragana orthography you get:
こくあんをがいするものあらばしよするにこくてんをもつて
In modern hiragana orthography, you get:
こくあんをがいするものあらばしょするにこくてんをもって

You can see that:
  • しょ and もって are spelled as しよ and もつて.
  • The first を is written with the modern hiragana, while the second を is written with hentaigana (derived from 越); similarly, the first す is modern while the second is hentaigana (derived from 春), showing that different forms of the same hiragana can appear even in the same sentence
  • の is also written in hentaigana
  • も, る, and て are also hentaigana, though derived from the same characters (毛, 留, and 天) as their modern counterparts.
  • naturally, non-simplified kanji are used (國, 處 vs. 国, 処)
EDIT: It's kind of unfortunate, I made two posts in a row and the second one appeared on a new page. Please notice I have one before this one as wel!

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LinguistCat
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Re: Questions about Japanese

Post by LinguistCat »

Thank you for both the posts clearing things up a bit. It's not that the sound changes for h-w-j were difficult to understand going forward, it's that I've had a difficult time finding and online dictionary for Classical Japanese and it would be a bit harder deriving things backward. If you have one you could suggest, or a relatively inexpensive dead tree version, that would help a lot at this point. Thank you for the help so far with answering my questions.
The stars are an ocean. Your breasts, are also an ocean.

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clawgrip
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Re: Questions about Japanese

Post by clawgrip »

Online, I use this one, but there's no English at all since it only does Classical Japanese to modern Japanese, so I'm not sure if it will be helpful to you or not.

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LinguistCat
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Re: Questions about Japanese

Post by LinguistCat »

Thank you. It's far better than nothing and if I don't know enough of the modern language to get use out of it, it'll only push me to study more.
The stars are an ocean. Your breasts, are also an ocean.

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Chagen
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Re: Questions about Japanese

Post by Chagen »

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...
Nūdhrēmnāva naraśva, dṛk śraṣrāsit nūdhrēmanīṣṣ iźdatīyyīm woḥīm madhēyyaṣṣi.
satisfaction-DEF.SG-LOC live.PERFECTIVE-1P.INCL but work-DEF.SG-PRIV satisfaction-DEF.PL.NOM weakeness-DEF.PL-DAT only lead-FUT-3P

Astraios
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Re: Questions about Japanese

Post by Astraios »

I don’t know anything about Japanese, but it looks like you’re conflating historical morphology with modern still-productive morphology. If ochiru’s modern causative is ochisaseru, but its ancient causative (/transitive) counterpart came out in modern Japanese as otosu, then you aren’t deriving otosu from ochisaseru by fiddling with the modern causative suffix, you’re just looking at a historical pair of verbs with no-longer-productive derivational suffixes that can’t be derived from each other by modern morphology.

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clawgrip
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Re: Questions about Japanese

Post by clawgrip »

The main three players here are -e, -(a)su, and -(a)r(er)u.

-e switches transitivity to the opposite of whatever the base root is.
-(a)su (derived from the verb CJ su "to do") creates transitive verbs
-(a)r(er)u (derived from the CJ verb ari "to be (somewhere)") creates intransitive verbs.

There are also verbs that have a completely unrelated -e or -i that is not the -e above, that are relics of older verb classes that have now merged into one.

With this in mind, the things you find counterintuitive are rather intuitive:

hanareru: uses intransitive (a)r(er)u
hanasu: uses transitive (a)su

fueru/fuyasu and so forth are understandable when you realize that in earlier forms of Japanese, all instances of $e were /je/ until probably the meiji period, so that used to be fuyeru/fuyasu, falling completely in line with the rest. Then /je/ unilaterally became /e/, creating this type of pair.

I have never been able to determine what happened to cause the i/o pairs. There are a few other oddballs, like oshieru/osowaru. Nevertheless, osowaru uses the suffix (a)r(er)u, so it is clear which is intransitive and which is transitive.

付ける to mean "can be attached" is not so common, but as you say, you could differentiate them based on whether there is an object or not. Plus there are other ways to say "can" or "may".

As I said elsewhere, potentials are intransitive by default, and intransitive and passive suffixes are related, so it's not especially odd that potential, passive, and the transitivity-switching suffix would get friendly with each other.

I am not really familiar with -sasu as a slang form (outside of when it is followed by a suffix starting with /t/), unless I am drawing a major blank here. Maybe someone uses it! However, I am not following this train of thought:
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.
-sasu (among whomever uses it!) is just a contraction, just as -reru is a contraction of -rareru. (though coincidentally, the CJ form of -saseru is indeed -sasu).

For what it's worth, let's compare some modern and classical Japanese:

indicative causative

Code: Select all

    IND     POT          IND    POT
MJ  ochiru  ochisaseru   otosu  otosaseru
CJ  otsu    ochisasu     otosu  otosasu
obviously -su and -(s)asu are related, but they have diverged enough to have different roles. Perhaps in Old Japanese, or even before that, they were identical, and you could not differentiate "drop" from "cause to fall" in this way.

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finlay
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Re: Questions about Japanese

Post by finlay »

Astraios wrote:I don’t know anything about Japanese, but it looks like you’re conflating historical morphology with modern still-productive morphology. If ochiru’s modern causative is ochisaseru, but its ancient causative (/transitive) counterpart came out in modern Japanese as otosu, then you aren’t deriving otosu from ochisaseru by fiddling with the modern causative suffix, you’re just looking at a historical pair of verbs with no-longer-productive derivational suffixes that can’t be derived from each other by modern morphology.
pretty much

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Chagen
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Re: Questions about Japanese

Post by Chagen »

Welp, I was overthinking things. Silly me.

In other news, I am for some reason trying to read some untranslated Japanese media and want to know if I got the meaning of this rather simple sentence correct:

ボクはお兄ちゃんだから、情けないところを見せちゃいけない

Assuming my terrible japanese is correct, this roughly translates to "I'm a big brother, so I can't show (such) a pitiful sight"...or something. Or "...I can't show something so pitiful", maybe? It's ところ that's got me tripped up, I know it literally means "place" but here it seems to mean a incorporeal thing--"something pitiful" or something like that.

...actually I'm pretty sure he's talking about how he can't let someone else be so pitiful, since he's their big brother, I presume. Damn ambiguous language.

Don't worry I wont constantly bug you guys about translating sentences lol

Also there is nothing more aggravating than endlessly searching for a radical in a kanji only to learn that the WHOLE DAMN KANJI is a radical. Especially when it consists of what appears to be actual radicals themselves.
Nūdhrēmnāva naraśva, dṛk śraṣrāsit nūdhrēmanīṣṣ iźdatīyyīm woḥīm madhēyyaṣṣi.
satisfaction-DEF.SG-LOC live.PERFECTIVE-1P.INCL but work-DEF.SG-PRIV satisfaction-DEF.PL.NOM weakeness-DEF.PL-DAT only lead-FUT-3P

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finlay
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Re: Questions about Japanese

Post by finlay »

(I would assume, without context: ) "I can't let you see me being so pathetic"

Equally it could be "you can't let me see you" or any other configuration of pronouns.

("Show such a pitiful sight" doesn't strike me as idiomatic in English, nor indeed does the word pitiful)

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