fubarobfusco comments on Local Ordinances of Fun - Less Wrong

18 Post author: Alicorn 18 June 2012 03:07AM

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Comment author: fubarobfusco 20 June 2012 06:19:34PM 0 points [-]

The claim that I've read and heard from linguists about this is that while words like janpusuru are semantically verbs, grammatically they are a noun janpu + the standard verb suru.

Contrast the English expression "I am doing homework" vs. "I am *homeworking". "Homework" isn't really used as a verb in English, but we can express the idea of homework-as-an-action by saying "do homework".

New non-suru verbs in Japanese do apparently happen from time to time (Wikipedia uses the example of guguru — "to google") but they're rare, so the class is mostly closed.

Comment author: thomblake 20 June 2012 06:45:24PM 0 points [-]

That makes good sense.