Re: Inchoactive in Jpn? (was: "Anticipatory" Tense)
| From: | Douglas Koller, Latin & French <latinfrench@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, March 6, 2002, 2:03 |
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Matt (MES) wrote:
>--- Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...> replied:
>
> > or "starting", e.g. Japanese: hanasu "to talk" -
>> hanashidasu "to start to talk" furu "rain" -
>> furidasu "to start to rain"
>
>Really!? I never knew that this phenomenon of
>Japanese verbs would be considered a tense! I just
>lumped it, mentally, as a Japanese-language
>characteristic as some of the other following
>examples:
>
> kaku - "write"
> kakinaosu - "rewrite"
> ukeru - "receive"
> ireru - "put (in)"
> ukeireru - "intake"
> wakarimasu - "understand, know"
> wakarikanemasu - "not know, not understand"
>
>Are you sure about the above as being classified a
>verb tense? Also, doesn't _hanashidasu_ really refer
>to something more like _to speak up (suddenly)_,
>whereas _hanashihajimeru_ would be better suited to
>_to start to speak_ ??
Boku mo... I'm inclined to agree with you. Though my mental
lumping-together, via kanji, was with Chinese compound verbs. Eg:
"hanashidasu" with "shuo1chu1lai2" ("dasu" and "chu1" are the same
kanji; the kanji for "hanashi" in the sense of "speak" is retained in
Cantonese "wa6", but Mandarin more frequently uses "shuo1" (or
"jiang3"), that kanji being the "setsu" of "setsumei", "explanation".
Obviously, this gimmick doesn't always work, but it helped me out
when I plunked myself in Japan. Analogies -- they're a good thing.
Kou
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