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This sentence is from a book about Japanese grammar written for native
Japanese speakers:

ところでこれに類したことは、寺村先生ならずとも、多くの日本語教師が経験することではないでしょうか。

  * The これ refers to a past incident where a Japanese teacher's explanation of the particle が to foreigners ended up being confusing and incomplete.
  * Teramura-sensei is a Japanese teacher who the book refers to as a pioneer in Japanese language teaching.

"Incidentally, incidents like this are probably encountered by many Japanese
teachers, and not just Teramura-sensei." seems like a reasonable translation,
but I don't know what's going on with that ならずとも。 If it means "ならないとも" then I
would expect to see a に or と just before (に・となる) but that doesn't seem to be
the case.

Can anyone clarify what that ならずとも is signifying? Thanks in advance.
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2014-12-26T20:17:15.693
21036
2014-12-27T00:39:03.930
2014-12-26T23:03:03.643
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question
grammar
Meaning of ならずとも
This is a negated form of the literary copula なる (fused from に＋ある). It's not
the verb なる "become", so inserting に or と wouldn't be appropriate. Here, it
attaches directly to the noun phrase 寺村先生.

The literary form 〜ずとも generally means roughly 〜なくても, so the literal meaning
of 〜ならずとも is close to the colloquial 〜じゃなくても "even if it isn't". This phrase
is used to mean something like だけでなく, "others besides ..." or "in addition to
...".

This is covered in Martin's 1975 _Reference Grammar of Japanese_ , p.368 and
p.1010.
CC BY-SA 3.0
2014-12-26T23:02:57.560
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2014-12-27T00:39:03.930
2014-12-27T00:39:03.930
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answer