A discovery that rocked and shocked the nation of my mind

2006-02-18

A discovery that rocked and shocked the nation of my mind

There is a Japanese verb kaimamiru (垣間見る) which, as the kanji suggests, means "to peer through a gap in a fence". That's not the rock-/shocking part. The r/s part is that there were older forms kaimamu and kaibamu.

miru? Archetypical vowel-stem verb? What the fuck are you doing acting like a consonant-stem sucker, dude?

Popularity factor: 7

IbaDaiRon:

Ack! This again?! Ack!

morgan:

The foundation of my knowledge of Japanese has been shaken. 見る, I hardly knew thee.

Azuma:

Well, I think that's pretty cool. And there's also hu乾, for later hiru乾る, The page you found before explains that consonant verbs themselves were actually vowel verbs of a sort to begin with, but even so, it shows that at some point there was a levelling trend towards those "consonant" types, which are more numerous by far, after all. Maybe it shows that that "consonant" verbs stabilized earlier as a conjugation?

IbaDaiRon:

(Azuma...what have you been up to?)

The Tensor:

Were the older forms actually spelled with 見, or were they something like 垣間む?

Azuma:

IDR: Home for Christmas, then back to 24/7 school as long as juken lasts, basically. Until March 7th, my life is devoted to trying to raise the scores of a handful of students about ten to fifteen points on pointless tests I hate but can do nothing about, sigh. It'll be all worth it if they all get in, though. Thanks for asking, though.

(Matt> sorry to use your comment space to, um, chat)

Matt:

No problem, although, for entirely selfish reasons, I want Azuma to start blogging again too...

Tensor: I can't recall actually having seen it in that form, only "kaimami", indeed spelt 垣間見. It's possible that this came first, as a noun, and "kaimamu" was backformed (like mokuromu), I guess.

2006-02-18