I know that in general, if a 形容詞 in modern Japanese ends in ～しい, then it was
originally a シク活用形容詞, with 終止形 ～し and 連體形 ～しき. I also know that in the Late
Middle Japanese period, シク adjectives developed a 終止形 of ～しし, which then
merged with ～しき and evolved into modern ～しい. But I'm wondering whether there
were any ク活用形容詞 that currently end in ～しい; i.e., with classical 終止形 ～し
(preceded directly by another し in the adjective root) and 連體形 ～き (but again
preceded directly by し in the adjective root). It seems that just by random
chance some of these could have occurred.

Again, I am not referring to the ～しし 終止形 that developed for シク adjectives in
the Late Middle Japanese Period.

Thank you very much.
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-07-10T14:16:27.697
36564
2016-07-11T17:15:44.077
16057
question
classical-japanese i-adjectives
形容詞 that end in ～しい but were not シク活用 in 古文
That's an interesting idea, but it actually couldn't have occurred by random
chance, because it was impossible for an Old Japanese /ku/ adjective to have a
stem ending in /-i/ (or, at least, no such words are attested).

A mild caveat to this: I once read (I forget where, sorry) that for many of
the adjectives that came down to us in the /siku/ group, we do not have
phonographic attestation in Old Japanese to prove that they _were_ in fact
/siku/ adjectives at that stage. We just assume that they were because that's
how they appear in Heian-period documents. So it's technically possible that
among the /siku/ adjectives there are a few that, in Old Japanese, were just
/ku/ adjectives with a stem ending in /-si/, and were reanalyzed in Middle
Japanese as /siku/ adjectives (roughly as you suggest could have happened).

However, given the apparent restriction on _any_ stems ending in /-i/, and
circumstantial evidence like the fact that /siku/ adjectives tend to be
semantically distinctive, describing subjective or psychological states, this
doesn't seem especially likely.
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-07-11T17:15:44.077
36586
2016-07-11T17:15:44.077
531
36564
answer