The magical fecundity of the Japanese verb suru ("to do") and verb ending -ru

October 10, 2014 @ 3:57 pm · Filed by under Usage, Verb formation

« previous post | next post »

The Agency for Cultural Affairs' annual survey on Japanese usage is out. This year's results as reported in the media:

% of people who use

chin suru チンする ("to 'nuke' something in the microwave") = 90.4%
("chin" is the sound your microwave makes to let you know your food is ready)
cf. "Microwave display"

saboru サボる ("to slack off", esp. "to cut / skip classes") = 86.4%
(apparently from the French "sabotage")

ocha suru お茶する ("to go to a cafe / tea shop", lit., "to do tea") = 66.4%
(What's with all the .4%s?!)
Most common w/ 30-somethings (90.3%), least w/ 70s (37.9%)

panikuru パニクる ("to panic") = 49.4%
Again, most common w/ 30s (75.9%), least w/ 70s (17.2%)

disuru ディスる ("to diss" [i.e., "disrespect" someone]) = 5.5% (even w/ 16-19, only 34.1%)

Other katakana + -ru る verbs

memoru メモる ("to take notes / memo")

hamoru ハモる to sing in harmony

demoru デモる ("to demonstrate / protest" — very 60s)

bazuru バズる ("to [make a] buzz [i.e., "go viral"])

doyaru ドヤる ("to make a dōya どうや! ['Ha!] face", kind of like "booyah!")

tahiru タヒる ("to die" — from the bottom half of shinu 死ぬ ["to die"])

Of course, adding suru する / -ru る is the most common way to verbalize a noun in Japanese, so this is not surprising, just interesting for the creativity.

Misunderstood/misused

seken zure 世間ずれ means seken o watatte zuru kashikoku natte iru 世間を渡ってずる賢くなっている            (roughly: "made wiser/more clever by experience"), but 55.2% thought it meant "out of step with the way the world thinks," and only 35.6% got the correct answer (must have been multiple choice)

yabusakadenai やぶさかでない (or yabusakade wa nai) やぶさかではない) = "be happy to do X," or "not mind doing X", but 43.7% "mistakenly" believe it means "do X w/o choice." Meh.

Unexpected

One of the most interesting results was that takuru タクる ("take a taxi") has apparently existed since before WWII, but is only used by 5.9% of Japanese.  My impression was that this kind of verb coinage construction (katakana + -ru る) is newer, as in daburu ダブる ("to double / coincide / overlap"), トラぶる or (I think more often) toraburu トラブる ("to malfunction"), guguru ググる ("to Google"). It's interesting that they're all phonetically similar, though.

Abbreviations

A few abbreviations from Twitter and the Internet using romaji (the alphabet) because of the typing / input process

ry = abbreviation of "abbreviation" (ryaku 略)
kwsk = abbreviation of "in detail" (kuwashiku 詳しく)

Sources:  here and here.

[Thanks to Nathan Hopson]

October 10, 2014 @ 3:57 pm · Filed by under Usage, Verb formation


13 Comments

  1. Tim Martin said,

    October 10, 2014 @ 4:29 pm

    misuru ミスる (to make a mistake) also seems to be common (at least among young people).

    And of course, let's not forget sutabaru スタバる (to go to Starbucks)!

  2. Coby Lubliner said,

    October 10, 2014 @ 4:32 pm

    How about セックスする?

  3. Chris Kern said,

    October 10, 2014 @ 7:23 pm

    I believe that appending verb suffixes to loan nouns goes back a long way in the language; I would have to do more research, but I'm pretty sure classical Japanese has some Chinese loans that were lexicalized into verbs or adjectives. There's 目論む (mokuromu) which apparently goes back at least to the middle ages but I'm not sure of any older examples. If Matt comes along maybe he can help?

    (Adding "suru" to Chinese loans is very old, but actually turning them into conjugated verbs may be newer.)

  4. Jeff said,

    October 10, 2014 @ 8:07 pm

    @Coby Lubliner

    I think identity avoidance makes Japanese speakers lean toward using エチする. Two すs in a row at a morpheme border feels icky.

  5. Elessorn said,

    October 10, 2014 @ 8:10 pm

    Not sure what it means, but I have the strong feeling that a lot of these ru-coinages, as opposed to suru-verbs, are used much more frequently in their oblique forms, -tte and -tta especially, than in "dictionary form" with the -ru showing.

  6. Jim Breen said,

    October 10, 2014 @ 8:23 pm

    I think it's actually a どや face rather than a どうや one. どやる (much more common than ドヤる) has made it into 大辞林: "俗に、どや顔になること。 → どや顔".

  7. Ben Zimmer said,

    October 10, 2014 @ 9:01 pm

    The Asahi Shimbun notes another verb undergoing semantic shift:

    “[N]itsumaru,” which translates literally as “(something) boils down,” traditionally applied to a situation in which a meeting is about to conclude successfully after an exhaustive discussion of all pertinent issues.

    Recently, however, “nitsumaru” has also come to denote a situation in which all participants in a discussion have completely run out of ideas and are unable to reach an agreement.

    In the past, when you described negotiations as becoming “nitsumaru,” you meant that an accord was imminent. But today, you could mean the opposite–that a breakdown is imminent.

    According to the results of a public opinion survey concerning the Japanese language released late last month by the Agency for Cultural Affairs, a majority of respondents use the expression “nitsumaru” in its traditional, positive sense, while 40 percent use it to denote a dead end ahead. Most of the respondents in their 50s and older were in the former category, while most in their 40s and younger were in the latter.

  8. Chris Kern said,

    October 10, 2014 @ 9:17 pm

    The classical example of this that is usually brought up is 役不足 (yakubusoku), which means that your job is not worthy of your skills. But now it's often used to mean the opposite, that your skills are not equal to the job.

  9. Akito said,

    October 11, 2014 @ 12:38 am

    I was shocked recently when a colleague of mine wrote in a report "…を鑑みて" instead of "…に鑑みて". I hear this mis- (or innovative) use of を for に quite often, even from news readers. Language is changing faster than I can catch up with.

  10. Victor Mair said,

    October 11, 2014 @ 9:38 am

    From Michael Carr:

    This –ru is a linguistic wonder. There’s even Makudonarudo-ru.

  11. Matt said,

    October 11, 2014 @ 12:14 pm

    One potential candidate attested in the Kamakura period (a bit earlier than /mokuromu/) is /egomu/, "guard", which is a bit mysterious and not well-attested but which contemporary sources at least derived from Sino-Japanese 衛護 /eigo/, "guard".

    It is interesting as the post points out that the majority of these words end in /oru/ or /uru/ specifically. Maybe it's slightly harder to get the /ru/ suffix to stick to other vowels because of conflicts with existing patterns in the language? (e.g. passive/intransitive verbs ending in /aru/, vowel-stem verbs ending in /iru/ or /eru/) Or maybe it's just confirmation bias, or lingering phonotactic influence from early adoptees (/takuru/, /saboru/)…

  12. Akito said,

    October 11, 2014 @ 11:34 pm

    Two すs in a row at a morpheme border feels icky.

    Not to this speaker. E.g., パスする, キスする, トスする. I think it's more to do with prosody.　

  13. J Silk said,

    October 12, 2014 @ 6:00 am

    the ability to verbalize nouns is very well known in Dutch; a propos Victor's citation from Michael Carr "There’s even Makudonarudo-ru." I found within a few seconds via google: "Bowlen en McDonalden met de zonen, op zondag." and "zovaak mcdonalden we niet…" just as two examples (the first = we will go bowling and to McDonalds with our sons on Sunday," and "We don't go to McDonalds so frequently." There must be studies of this phenomenon in Dutch…

RSS feed for comments on this post