2.1. INFLECTING 55
verbsThere are two things worth noting in this table. Firstly, the
for is not a typographical error; it really is , not. This is a left-over
from classical Japanese: verbs ending on used to be verbs ending
on and (being ’wu’, rather than ’u’), which inflected respectively as
- , - , - , - , - and - , - , - , - , - ( and being the now
obsolete Japanese syllables for ’wi’ and ’we’, which have not been in use
since the reform). However, both were pronounced - , - , - , - and
-. When these two verb classes were simplified to today’s verbs
ending on the modern , the pronunciation was kept, as well as
its wriĴen form.
The second thing worth noting in the table is the seemingly dispro-
portionate number of examples for verbs ending on -. The reason
for this is that for some verbs ending on , just looking at the verb’s dic-
tionary form is not enough to determine whether it’s actually a or an
verb, so a few examples are needed to show how to tell the two apart.
If a verb ends on , and the syllable preceding it in the –, – or –row
(such as in , and ) then this is always a verb. How-
ever, if the syllable before the is in the – or –row, then it might be
an verb instead. The annoying thing is that without actually looking
up the verb in a dictionary, or seeing it used in some inflected form that
lets you spot the difference between a base and an base being
used, there is no way to tell what kind of verb you’re dealing with. Luck-
ily, telling the difference when we do have an inflected form is really easy,
as we can tell from the following inflection examples (taking note that
the as used in this book is just the stem):
( / )
( / )
( / )Comparing this table with the previous one shows that for any in-