zompist bboard

Chagen wrote:=
6: There are no godan verbs ending in -hu, -pu, -d(z)u, -zu, or -yu (not counting -Cyu or -wu because the former morae are Chinese influence, and the latter verbs became -Vu AKAIK), as well as only one ending in -nu (死ぬ shinu "die"). There are, e.g, plenty of -su verbs, so why no -zu verbs? Likewise, what happened to all the other -nu verbs (unless shinu really was the only one ever)?

-pu verbs would have become -hu (> -fu), and -/h/ in japanese seems prone to dropping so maybe they just merged with -Vu verbs. Still, -zu verbs should just be identical to -su verbs except with -za/-ji/-zu/-ze/-zo. -du has merged with -zu in most dialects, but that would just bolster the amount of -zu verbs. /y/ in Japanese is only distinct before /a o u/, but that would still leave -ya/-i/-yu/-e/-yo...I can't this entire class being bowled over just from that.

Chagen wrote:3: Is 出来る dekiru really a historical combination of 出る deru "come out, leave" and 来る　kuru "come"? The kanji seem to imply so, and Jisho doesn't say it's ateji. I can't see how "leave+come" could turn into a suppletive potential for "do". I thought it might have been a combination of de and kuru (I could see "come by/at" possibly becoming "can do", if I squint), but it's not written as で来る, it's dekiru not *dekuru (umlaut does not appear to be a thing in Japanese), and it's a ichidan as opposed to godan.

Maybe Martin wrote:Over this same period, the meaning gradually shifted from “to come out” to include “to appear, to become manifest”, and from there “to come into existence anew”. This then extended further to “to occur, to happen; to be born; to be created, to be produced”, and thence “to come to fruition; to be completed, to be finished (with positive overtones)”. The underlying sense of latent existence gave rise to the meaning of “to be capable of making or producing something”, and then simply “to be able to do”.

Chagen wrote:5: Japanese has closed-class verbs

linguoboy wrote:

Chagen wrote:5: Japanese has closed-class verbs

Sez who? May favourite recent coinage is ググる "to google", since the final syllable ends up being reanalysed as the verbal termination る on the pattern of earlier トラブる and ダブる.

Chagen wrote:1: According to dictionaries, 絶対 zettai is a na-adjective, even though it ends in -i (and I've heard zettai ni for "absolutely" in Japanese media). However, I swear I have heard in either anime or visual novels characters say zettaku for "absolutely" as if it were a regular i-adjective (as well as zettakunai, I think). Is this a thing that happens in regular Japanese or did I mis-hear?

2: In various Japanese media I've heard people suffix -ra to demonstratives and pronouns only to make plurals (that are always treated as plural, unlike -tachi. I've heard お前ら　omera 僕ら　bokura あいつら aitsura　こいつら koitsura　君ら kimira　俺ら orera and I think 我ら warera (but never 私ら watashira or あたしら atashira...). Is this common in real-life Japanese or is it more an anime/manga/VN thing? Also I wonder where this suffix came from, as it's a true plural and Japanese has basically none of those.

3: Is 出来る dekiru really a historical combination of 出る deru "come out, leave" and 来る　kuru "come"? The kanji seem to imply so, and Jisho doesn't say it's ateji. I can't see how "leave+come" could turn into a suppletive potential for "do". I thought it might have been a combination of de and kuru (I could see "come by/at" possibly becoming "can do", if I squint), but it's not written as で来る, it's dekiru not *dekuru (umlaut does not appear to be a thing in Japanese), and it's a ichidan as opposed to godan.

Does suru even have a normal potential? Would that be *sureru or shirareru?

4: Did some ichidan verbs once have stems ending in more than just -e or -i? Many of kuru's forms all look like an ichidan with a stem ending in -o (e.g taberu:kuru, tabenai:kona, taberareru:korareru?

4b: Where did the distinction between ichidan and godan verbs come from (sorry if this is way too complicated to answer)? Ichidan verbs end only in -eru and -iru: the former looks suspiciously like a godan-derived potential but that doesn't make any sense.

5: Japanese has closed-class verbs, yet has the pair 歌　uta "song" and 歌う "to sing". There's no way to view this other than noun > verb derivation (by suffixing -(w)u); a verb > noun derivation woul give us *utai. I swear I've also seen another godan derived from a foreign loanword, and in the realm of i-adjectives, we have two unusual situations:

-kirai "hateful" is plainly derived from kirau "to hate" but no other verb > i-adjective derivation like this exists AFAIK

-On the internet I've seen people take the loanword エロ ero and turn it into a i-adjective エロい eroi "lewd, erotic". Are there any other causes of derived i-adjectives like this?

6: There are no godan verbs ending in -hu, -pu, -d(z)u, -zu, or -yu (not counting -Cyu or -wu because the former morae are Chinese influence, and the latter verbs became -Vu AKAIK), as well as only one ending in -nu (死ぬ shinu "die"). There are, e.g, plenty of -su verbs, so why no -zu verbs? Likewise, what happened to all the other -nu verbs (unless shinu really was the only one ever)?

-pu verbs would have become -hu (> -fu), and -/h/ in japanese seems prone to dropping so maybe they just merged with -Vu verbs.

Still, -zu verbs should just be identical to -su verbs except with -za/-ji/-zu/-ze/-zo. -du has merged with -zu in most dialects, but that would just bolster the amount of -zu verbs. /y/ in Japanese is only distinct before /a o u/, but that would still leave -ya/-i/-yu/-e/-yo...I can't this entire class being bowled over just from that.

-nu conjugation has merged with -mu and -bu in a few places (e.g Old -mite -nite -bite all become -nde, but even then shinu has remained distinct (that a verbal class consisting of a single verb has remained distinct is honestly impressive)

7: I recently had someone on /jp/ translate this rap song for me and some parts of it I found interesting (though I think he messed up in a few places):

-At 3:44 this line occurs:
都の鬼も連日騒ぐ　頭っから浴びる泉質は格別
miyako no oni mo renjitsu sawagu atamakkara abiru senshitsu wa kakubetsu
The capital’s oni live it up day after day, the feeling of quality water over your head can’t be beat...

For some reason the vocalist, Rainyblueytr, says 頭っから atamakkara for "over your head" instead of 頭から atama kara. Is this just a thing to make the rap go more smoothly, because I've never seen this spontaneous gemination of post-positions in any media.

Chagen wrote:-On the internet I've seen people take the loanword エロ ero and turn it into a i-adjective エロい eroi "lewd, erotic". Are there any other causes of derived i-adjectives like this?

clawgrip wrote:

2: In various Japanese media I've heard people suffix -ra to demonstratives and pronouns only to make plurals (that are always treated as plural, unlike -tachi. I've heard お前ら　omera 僕ら　bokura あいつら aitsura　こいつら koitsura　君ら kimira　俺ら orera and I think 我ら warera (but never 私ら watashira or あたしら atashira...). Is this common in real-life Japanese or is it more an anime/manga/VN thing? Also I wonder where this suffix came from, as it's a true plural and Japanese has basically none of those.

Japanese has three plurals, but they are not true plurals, they are associative plurals, which is why they are primarily only used for humans (in the adult world, at least; children (and possibly women more often than men maybe, in informal situations) tend to anthropomorphize). -tachi is a neutral associative plural, while -ra is a slightly informal or derogatory form of it (though it is regularized in karera et al).

Chagen wrote: 1: According to dictionaries, 絶対 zettai is a na-adjective, even though it ends in -i (and I've heard zettai ni for "absolutely" in Japanese media). However, I swear I have heard in either anime or visual novels characters say zettaku for "absolutely" as if it were a regular i-adjective (as well as zettakunai, I think). Is this a thing that happens in regular Japanese or did I mis-hear?

2: In various Japanese media I've heard people suffix -ra to demonstratives and pronouns only to make plurals (that are always treated as plural, unlike -tachi. I've heard お前ら　omera 僕ら　bokura あいつら aitsura　こいつら koitsura　君ら kimira　俺ら orera and I think 我ら warera (but never 私ら watashira or あたしら atashira...). Is this common in real-life Japanese or is it more an anime/manga/VN thing? Also I wonder where this suffix came from, as it's a true plural and Japanese has basically none of those.

3: Is 出来る dekiru really a historical combination of 出る deru "come out, leave" and 来る　kuru "come"? The kanji seem to imply so, and Jisho doesn't say it's ateji. I can't see how "leave+come" could turn into a suppletive potential for "do". I thought it might have been a combination of de and kuru (I could see "come by/at" possibly becoming "can do", if I squint), but it's not written as で来る, it's dekiru not *dekuru (umlaut does not appear to be a thing in Japanese), and it's a ichidan as opposed to godan.

Does suru even have a normal potential? Would that be *sureru or shirareru?

5: Japanese has closed-class verbs, yet has the pair 歌　uta "song" and 歌う "to sing". There's no way to view this other than noun > verb derivation (by suffixing -(w)u); a verb > noun derivation woul give us *utai. I swear I've also seen another godan derived from a foreign loanword, and in the realm of i-adjectives, we have two unusual situations:

-kirai "hateful" is plainly derived from kirau "to hate" but no other verb > i-adjective derivation like this exists AFAIK

-On the internet I've seen people take the loanword エロ ero and turn it into a i-adjective エロい eroi "lewd, erotic". Are there any other causes of derived i-adjectives like this?

7: I recently had someone on /jp/ translate this rap song for me and some parts of it I found interesting (though I think he messed up in a few places):

-At 3:44 this line occurs:
都の鬼も連日騒ぐ　頭っから浴びる泉質は格別
miyako no oni mo renjitsu sawagu atamakkara abiru senshitsu wa kakubetsu
The capital’s oni live it up day after day, the feeling of quality water over your head can’t be beat...

For some reason the vocalist, Rainyblueytr, says 頭っから atamakkara for "over your head" instead of 頭から atama kara. Is this just a thing to make the rap go more smoothly, because I've never seen this spontaneous gemination of post-positions in any media.

finlay wrote:

2: In various Japanese media I've heard people suffix -ra to demonstratives and pronouns only to make plurals (that are always treated as plural, unlike -tachi. I've heard お前ら　omera 僕ら　bokura あいつら aitsura　こいつら koitsura　君ら kimira　俺ら orera and I think 我ら warera (but never 私ら watashira or あたしら atashira...). Is this common in real-life Japanese or is it more an anime/manga/VN thing? Also I wonder where this suffix came from, as it's a true plural and Japanese has basically none of those.

it's not a true plural, it's a collective plural. the only one i've heard irl is 彼ら

3: Is 出来る dekiru really a historical combination of 出る deru "come out, leave" and 来る　kuru "come"? The kanji seem to imply so, and Jisho doesn't say it's ateji. I can't see how "leave+come" could turn into a suppletive potential for "do". I thought it might have been a combination of de and kuru (I could see "come by/at" possibly becoming "can do", if I squint), but it's not written as で来る, it's dekiru not *dekuru (umlaut does not appear to be a thing in Japanese), and it's a ichidan as opposed to godan.

Does suru even have a normal potential? Would that be *sureru or shirareru?

no, it's ateji; no, there's no すれる. but the kanji for 出来る kind of suggest that meaning tangentially

-On the internet I've seen people take the loanword エロ ero and turn it into a i-adjective エロい eroi "lewd, erotic". Are there any other causes of derived i-adjectives like this?

they're only sort-of closed class - to join the class they have to fit a certain phonological pattern (hence ググった and so on, even though Google is usually グーグル - a japanese verb doesn't normally have a long vowel there)

i've heard むずい for むずかしい and a few other things like that

i think this is to do with the rap, but i'm fairly sure there's places where gemination can happen spontaneously in japanese, like やはり＞やっぱり so i don't see why から would be any different

Sumelic wrote: If I remember correctly, intervocalic /p/ (later /h/) was actually regularly lost in most contexts, not just prone to being lost. I think the course of development was /p/ > /ɸ/ (p-lenition), /ɸ/ > /β~w/ (intervocalic vocing), and then /w/ ended up being lost before any vowel that wasn't /a/. A relevant passage on Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?id=ix9r6 ... 0h&f=false

Chagen wrote:
3: AFAIK, Japanese originally did not allow any hiatus and had a very strict CV syllable structure (I don't know if initially open onsets were allowed). It wasn't until Chinese loanwords came en masse that CyV and the moraic /n/ appeared (speaking of that, why the hell is it a Uvular nasal /ɴ/? Nothing else in Japanese or Chinese even approaches an Uvular POA). However there are some words which have these yet MUST be native Japanese words (usually because they're verbs), such as the well-known 頑張る ganbaru "do well, persevere" (if I had a nickel for everytime I heard ganbare or ganbatte in anime...honestly, I've rarely heard 頑張る in any inflection but those two) or しゃべる shaberu "chat". I wonder what these words originally were. At first I guessed that ganbaru might have been ga(n/m)ibaru or summat, and underwent the same kind of simplifcation as, say, yomite > yonde, but I don't think that NibV > NbV is a thing like mite > nde was.

Gemination also was apparently not a thing before Chinese came in, which I find odd as Chinese doesn't even have phonemic gemination.

Chagen wrote: 1: At 0:49 this line occurs:
鬼が出るか蛇が出るか　頭上掲げるは唯一無二の魂　地獄の話
oni ga deru ka ja ga deru ka zujou kakageru wa yuiitsumuni no tamashi jigoku no hanashi

The translator listed this line as "What’s next? Oni? Snakes? Hanging high in the air, a one-of-a-kind soul, the story of hell!". Jisho/Rikaichan list 鬼が出るか蛇が出るか as an idiom meaning "You never know what might happen". Is this true? I've never heard this idiom, though I am well aware that I have a very skewed perception of Japanese, given that 99% of my exposure to it is anime and video games.

(You guys are probably rolling your eyes at my weeaboo self lol XP)

Sumelic wrote: If I remember correctly, intervocalic /p/ (later /h/) was actually regularly lost in most contexts, not just prone to being lost. I think the course of development was /p/ > /ɸ/ (p-lenition), /ɸ/ > /β~w/ (intervocalic vocing), and then /w/ ended up being lost before any vowel that wasn't /a/. A relevant passage on Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?id=ix9r6 ... 0h&f=false

Yeah I've noticed this. I have seen /h/ (and [ɸɯ]) almost exclusively word-initially, outside of a few rare words such as ご飯 gohan, 溢れる afureru as Clawgrip mentioned (interestingly, a light novel I'm reading is called Afureta...same verb?), and in the song I keep mentioning, 五線譜 gosenfu (which even struck me as a very unusual word when I first heard it).

3: AFAIK, Japanese originally did not allow any hiatus and had a very strict CV syllable structure (I don't know if initially open onsets were allowed). It wasn't until Chinese loanwords came en masse that CyV and the moraic /n/ appeared (speaking of that, why the hell is it a Uvular nasal /ɴ/? Nothing else in Japanese or Chinese even approaches an Uvular POA). However there are some words which have these yet MUST be native Japanese words (usually because they're verbs), such as the well-known 頑張る ganbaru "do well, persevere" (if I had a nickel for everytime I heard ganbare or ganbatte in anime...honestly, I've rarely heard 頑張る in any inflection but those two) or しゃべる shaberu "chat". I wonder what these words originally were. At first I guessed that ganbaru might have been ga(n/m)ibaru or summat, and underwent the same kind of simplifcation as, say, yomite > yonde, but I don't think that NibV > NbV is a thing like mite > nde was.

Gemination also was apparently not a thing before Chinese came in, which I find odd as Chinese doesn't even have phonemic gemination.

4: Are there any other natlangs which have analogues to onbin (i.e certain phonological processes that only occur during inflection, and are morphologically conditioned). You could say it's just morphophonology, but onbin only occur during verbal inflection and nowhere else. It really feels like an unnaturalistic feature in a noob conlang (Japanese feels like a weird conlang to me most of the time tbh).

For instance, /k g/ both drop before /i/ in verbal inflection, with /g/ also voicing a following voiceless consonant (e.g *yakita *oyogita" > yaita oyoida "grilled, swam". However in verbs this only occurs in the past tense. -ku and -gu verbs still have normal i-grades such as the -masu form (yakimasu oyogimasu). My guess for this is that the polite form is clearly i-grade in the other verbs (noborimasu, machimasu, tsukaimasu, shinimasu(?), whereas the past tense is just a complete mess (nobotta, matta, tsukatta, shinda...) not connected to any particular grade, so maybe analogy has run through the forms and fixed stuff.

Then there's the i-adjectives which have *ki > i regularly, explaining why their other forums suddenly gain a -k- (atsui > atsukunai)

Chagen wrote:頑張る ganbaru "do well, persevere" (if I had a nickel for everytime I heard ganbare or ganbatte in anime...honestly, I've rarely heard 頑張る in any inflection but those two)

Chagen wrote:assuming that kirai is an i-adjective is pretty embarrassing!

I swear I've heard zettaku.

Sumelic wrote: If I remember correctly, intervocalic /p/ (later /h/) was actually regularly lost in most contexts, not just prone to being lost. I think the course of development was /p/ > /ɸ/ (p-lenition), /ɸ/ > /β~w/ (intervocalic vocing), and then /w/ ended up being lost before any vowel that wasn't /a/. A relevant passage on Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?id=ix9r6 ... 0h&f=false

Yeah I've noticed this. I have seen /h/ (and [ɸɯ]) almost exclusively word-initially, outside of a few rare words such as ご飯 gohan, 溢れる afureru as Clawgrip mentioned (interestingly, a light novel I'm reading is called Afureta...same verb?), and in the song I keep mentioning, 五線譜 gosenfu (which even struck me as a very unusual word when I first heard it).

2: The ending of the first bridge into the chorus (1:20) is this:
さぁ踊れや騒げ　飲めや歌えやお手を拝借
saa odore ya sawage (nomeya utaeya o-te wo haishaku)
Dance and live it up~ (Drink! Sing! Take my hand!)

The translator viewed nomeya utaeya as simple imperatives, but Jisho says that that's another fixed phrase meaning "revelry". What I'm wondering is if the ya in both words is the one that means "and", or if it's an old form of the imperative and the modern "e-grade + ∅" is just a truncation of that.

I personally find it a little odd that the same grade is used for both the potential/conditional and the imperative (i.e nomu "to drink" > nomeru "can drink", nomeba "if (he) drinks", nome! "drink!"). E-grade is obviously an irrealis and imperatives don't strike me as particularly irrealis.

yodan:    nom.a   nom.i   nom.u     nom.u   nom.e     nom.e
k.nidan:  tab.e   tab.e   tab.uru   tab.u   tab.ure   tab.eyo
n-irr:   shin.a  shin.i  shin.uru  shin.u  shin.ure  shin.e

However there are some words which have these yet MUST be native Japanese words (usually because they're verbs), such as the well-known 頑張る ganbaru "do well, persevere"

(if I had a nickel for everytime I heard ganbare or ganbatte in anime...honestly, I've rarely heard 頑張る in any inflection but those two)

しゃべる shaberu "chat"

/k g/ both drop before /i/ in verbal inflection, with /g/ also voicing a following voiceless consonant (e.g *yakita *oyogita" > yaita oyoida "grilled, swam". However in verbs this only occurs in the past tense. -ku and -gu verbs still have normal i-grades such as the -masu form (yakimasu oyogimasu). My guess for this is that the polite form is clearly i-grade in the other verbs (noborimasu, machimasu, tsukaimasu, shinimasu(?), whereas the past tense is just a complete mess (nobotta, matta, tsukatta, shinda...) not connected to any particular grade, so maybe analogy has run through the forms and fixed stuff.

Then there's the i-adjectives which have *ki > i regularly, explaining why their other forums suddenly gain a -k- (atsui > atsukunai)

Chagen wrote:Thank you for all the answers. However, in my onbin question, I wasn't asking about the actual processes. I wanted to know if there were any other natlangs which have a set of "sound changes" that only apply during verbal inflection (or maybe any kind of inflection--Japanese just has inflection in verbs only).

Chagen wrote:Thank you for all the answers. However, in my onbin question, I wasn't asking about the actual processes. I wanted to know if there were any other natlangs which have a set of "sound changes" that only apply during verbal inflection (or maybe any kind of inflection--Japanese just has inflection in verbs only). ki > Øi is not a regular sound change in Japanese AFAIK--nouns, and verbal/adjective roots retain /ki/--it's only in suffixes (and root-suffix boundaries) that this particular change occurs.

The part about *h become *w word-medially then finally dropping before everything but /a/ does explain why the topic and direction particles are spelled は and へ yet pronounced /wa/ and /e/. However, this makes me wonder something. This only happens word-medially--that is, initial *h remains. Therefore, isn't this conclusive proof that Japanese particles are morphologically a part of the word they agree with? If they weren't, then those two particles would have remained /ha he/. Since they became /wa (w)e/, they were considered word-final. This then makes me wonder why these couldn't be analyzed as case markers. Nothing can intervene between a particle and its argument, and stuff like これは > こりゃ (kore wa > korya) is more likely if the particles are suffixes as opposed to free-standing words, if that makes sense (similar simplifications have mostly happened in verbal suffixes: wakaranai/tsumaranai > wakannai/tsumannai).

Travis B. wrote:Where modern Japanese has long consonants - marked with a little tsu - you are implying that they had [tsu] consistently? Really?

Sumelic wrote:

Travis B. wrote:Where modern Japanese has long consonants - marked with a little tsu - you are implying that they had [tsu] consistently? Really?

...

I believe what vampyre_smiles is saying is that he's heard that at some point in the pre-reform Japanese writing system, the "tsu" character always represented /tu/ ([tsu]). I don't know if this is true or not. Many of the long consonants of modern Japanese do come from assimilation of historical /t/ to a following consonant after the loss of an intervening vowel.

finlay wrote:in hakodate the Dock area is written down as どつく in hiragana with a big tsu, but pronounced ドック as you'd expect from an english loanword. it bothered the shit out of me. but this might be what you mean? it's obviously a relic of the old spelling system or something

vampyre_smiles wrote:I've found some info about sound changes over time from then to Modern Japanese, and there are some things that are difficult to reconstruct if you don't already know that the spelling has been changed to reflect the pronunciation. From about 2 hours of Googling and reading, I saw it mentioned that what is now ん was likely originally closer to [mu] or [m], っ and つ were written as the latter and probably was pronounced as [tsu] in all cases (at least for a time and at least in some dialects).

But both of these are relatively easy to account for compared to a lot of mergers that have happened, especially with h-w-y-Vowels. I'm guessing some things can be sussed out just by looking at modern conjugations for some things, but it would be nice to be able to check for something and then try to back derive only if I have to, to derive an AltUniverse relative.