17444
So, I'm the type to understand how languages work than actually speaking them.
One thing which I really have a problem with is how で and は works. After a bit
of searching, I learned that で meant にて, and that was fine and all, but that
also complicated some stuff. Such as why is the て there relevant? Why not just
use に and forget about で?

I then decided to look at other languages. One thing I realized, mostly in
English, is how if you say "a is b," that doesn't mean "a == b," it means that
"a is in the list of b." I also then looked at the uses of the て form of verbs
and they seem to create a relationship between the two verbs, and from that, I
decided that the て there would connect the に section to the verb. So, an
example would be 「これはきれいである」 would mean that "This is in the list of
pretty(things).

Then, I was pretty much satisfied with that, until 「ではない」. That pretty much
made everything confusing to me again, on a large-scale. What I don't
understand is how the は there is relevant, why would you just not simply use
「でない」 instead of 「ではない」? What makes them so distinguished?

I'm really having a hard time trying to understand this, it's been a month,
and I still haven't been able to find and in-depth article about this, and
decided to come here instead.
CC BY-SA 3.0
2014-06-13T03:29:31.377
17415
2014-06-15T20:10:34.997
4439
question
particles
A Deeper Look Unto て, で and は
Let's see if I can explain this as thoroughly as possible.

は is the topic particle. It marks one of the following things:

  * Old information that's being talked about (analogous to 'the' in English)

  * A contrast (e.g. あの家は白いけど、この家は青い)

It really doesn't mark much else.

に is a lot of things, but most of them are irrelevant to this question. The
important uses are these:

  * The ren'youkei ('infinitive', which is a terrible term) of the Old and Middle Japanese copula なり

  * Locative (in Middle and Modern Japanese, only a static locative - it's where something is located, not where something is happening)

-て is a verbal continuative affix that attaches to the ren'youkei. Before Modern Japanese, it had a sense of _sequentiality_ (e.g. 'this and then that'); but these days X-て Y just means 'X and Y' regardless of whether the actions are sequential or simultaneous.

にて, then, is the Middle Japanese dynamic locative. It marks where things are
happening (in contrast to where they're located, which is just に). This
distinction between static and dynamic locatives is new as of Middle Japanese,
and I don't know if anyone can definitively say why this distinction was
created. (I personally suspect that it was an attempt to copy Korean's =e/=seo
distinction, but that's original research.) I don't know if anyone knows why
they picked this particular construction, either, though it is a valid way to
say 'exists in a place and then (something else)'. にて has since turned into で
through phonetic reduction.

What's にて doing in the copula, then? Japanese (and probably Japonic as a
whole) has had a copula of the form _locative_ +あり (modern ある) for as long as
we can tell. The original form was なり (from に+あり), though at some point around
the end of the 1500s Japanese switched from using に to using にて (>で) as the
copula's locative particle. I don't think anyone knows why, sometimes these
things just happen. である of course still exists in Modern Japanese, though it's
also been phonetically reduced - to だ in the northwest and to じゃ elsewhere,
and subsequently from じゃ to や in Kansai and a few other places.

The negative is で(は)ない because the negative of ある is ない. Why is there a topic
particle in there? My guess is this: because almost always, when you say 'X is
not Y', you're implying that X is something other than Y. It's then the
contrastive use of the topic particle - X is not _Y_ (but it is something
else). You can get the contrastive use without the negative also, as ではある,
though it's much less common. Over time, ではない has become a set phrase - it's
not so much that there's something semantically wrong with でない, it's just that
ではない is so much more common that it's replaced でない in the few uses where でない
might have been preferred, allowing the negative form to be ではない and only
ではない.

You can actually hear でない in certain cases, though. Relative clauses in formal
speech are one case - since you're not supposed to have topics inside
subclauses, you lose the は. (In informal speech, the set phrase effect comes
into play again, and the restriction on topics is ignored since no one's
thinking of は here as a topic marker at all anymore - it's just part of the
phrase.) You can also hear it as an alternative phonetic reduction to じゃない -
some areas in the northwest use でない as their everyday negative form of だ.

So in short: it's で instead of に because diachronic change sometimes does
things like that, and it's ではない instead of でない because ではない has turned into a
set phrase.
CC BY-SA 3.0
2014-06-14T18:53:48.960
17444
2014-06-15T20:10:34.997
2014-06-15T20:10:34.997
3639
3639
17415
answer