Re: QUERY: "zu" + the indexing Japanese grammar question

mirror wrote:
> [...]
> Just a follow up on the ~zu, Francis Drohan in "A Handbook of
> Japanese Usage" (ISBN: 0-8048-1610-7) says zu is an auxilliary verb
> from classical Japanese that conjugates as follows:
> (1) zu, na, or zara
> (2) zu, ni, or zari
> (3) zu, --, or zari
> (4) --, nu, or zaru
> (5) --, ne, or zare
> (6) --, --, or zara
> Drohan says the above has elements used in successive historical
> periods and that the middle entry has appeared as ~nu.

I'm not sure what you (or Drohan?) mean(s) by "the middle entry." The
second item in line (4) survives in colloquial Japanese as ん in 中国
(central Japan) Japanese and in Eastern forms such as ません borrowed
from central Japan. It shows up as ぬ in some hoity-toity forms.

It's the zu of line (2) that is under discussion, but whether it really
belongs in that line (supposedly the 連用形) or not is arguable. You
can't do most of the things with zu that you can do with the 連用形 of
verbs. (I was going to point out in this regard that 食べにいった sort
of means "I went (there) to eat," but 食べずにいった doesn't mean
anything like "I went (there) not to eat," but it's not that simple.)

The na and ni of lines (1) and (2) are so rare that I have never
encountered them while actually reading text. I'm pretty sure they were
gone by the 9th century, and hardly common in the 8th. Meanwhile nu and
ne of lines (4) and (5) survive to this day, if only in hoity-toity speech.

I question the existence of line (3) zari.

Surely zara in line (6) is a typo for zare. Either yours or Drohan's.

In my later years of teaching 文語, I allowed only lines (3), (4), and
(5) as proper "conjugations" of zu. The line-(2) one that we are
talking about I consider a special (if cognate) adverbial ending, much
like -naide in NJ, which is best considered a special suffix rather than
the conjugation of anything.

The five zar- forms are of course a contraction of that special zu with
forms of ari.

Bart
.