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In a recent comment I claimed that ない was a verb which was the negative form
of ある. I was surprised by the reply that "ない is an adjective (or adjective-
like auxiliary) anyway, not a form of ある".

Obviously I know that ない **behaves like** an adjective, but my confusion lies
in how Japanese people think about verb negation. Is ある->ない just a special
case? For example, does Japanese grammar think of 食べない as a verb which is the
negation of 食べる, or does it think of it as an adjective? Maybe I'm just trying
to apply western principles to Japanese grammar and my question doesn't even
make sense. I'm not sure.
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grammar negation
How does Japanese grammar think about verb negation?
That is confusing ない as
[adjective](https://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/word/%E3%81%AA%E3%81%84/#jn-162263)
and ない as [auxiliary
verb](https://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/word/%E3%81%AA%E3%81%84/#jn-162271).

The standalone ない is an adjective, but ない in 食べない is an auxiliary verb. This
is basically similar to negations in other languages in the sense that
negation is expressed by a functional word that is not used by itself. (Or
maybe Japanese grammarians stipulated so that it looks that way.)
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> Maybe I'm just trying to apply western principles to Japanese grammar and my
> question doesn't even make sense. I'm not sure.

Let's explore that possibility. I agree that the grammatical terms used to
describe English (along with most European languages, etc.) don't fit well to
describe Japanese.

The terms "noun" and "verb" are fairly universal, but even "noun" has
complications (there are many grammatical properties you might conceivably
expect a "noun" to have, and multiple overlapping classes of words in Japanese
that have some but not all of those properties). By the time you get to
"adjective" [there is already no clear
agreement](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/1008).

What we call "i-adjectives", i.e. what are natively called
[形]{けい}[容]{よう}[詞]{し} (literally "description words"), _function in most
respects the same way_ as verbs ([動]{どう}[詞]{し} "motion words", even though
this includes completely stative and intransitive verbs). In particular, they
are both _predicates_ , and they both can _be used attributively_.

Here by "predicate" I mean that by combining with just a grammatical subject
(and we can even omit this contextually in Japanese), we get a grammatically
complete (even if semantically vague) utterance. In English, we cannot say
"the cat cute"; we require a copula in order to turn the adjective "cute" into
a proper completion for the sentence. But in Japanese, 猫が可愛い is fine. The
particle が is not a copula, but only a case marker. We do not require です; and
if we add it then it is functioning as a politeness marker, not as a copula,
which is why we [can't substitute
だ](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/43244). The copular function -
the part represented by "is" in English (although this has many other uses in
English) - is already contained within 可愛い.

On the flip side, English does not allow us to use verbs to describe nouns
directly (attributively): we cannot say "a walks person", but instead "a
person who walks" - the verb needs to get pushed into an explicitly marked
relative clause using a relativizing pronoun. But in Japanese, 歩く人 is fine, in
the same way that 可愛い猫 is fine.

Mainly where these predicates differ is that 動詞 generally accept a full set of
case-marked participants in the "action" - が-marked grammatical subject,
を-marked grammatical direct object, as well as に- and で- marked participants
for which analogues are not as clear-cut. When used attributively, this
implies that something that would be a complex sentence by itself can then be
used to describe a noun by just dropping the noun after it (meaning something
like _" the (noun) for/in which (complex description of event or premise)
occurs/is the case"_). 形容詞 on the other hand, as far as I can recall seeing,
only accept a が-marked subject; and when used attributively, such a subject is
generally part of a fixed expression (e.g. 背が高い).

> Is ある->ない just a special case?

There are many ways to analyze this. My view is: _yes, but_ it's an
irregularity of the conjugation of ある - not a separate kind of ない. In
Japanese, the negations of 動詞 simply are 形容詞 that are formed using ない.

Whether the [未]{み}[然]{ぜん}[形]{けい} ("a-stem" for godan verbs) to which ない is
attached counts as a "word", let alone a "separate" word from the ない itself,
is a matter of definitions, and not a fruitful debate; but ない by itself does
negate ある, and it is the same thing as ない attached to a 動詞 in 未然形 form. It
just happens that ある is irregular, such that its "a-stem" is null when
attached to ない (although the volitional, ある -> あら+い -> あろう (via ウ音便), seems to
be regular). Alternately, we could say that ある is "defective", and the verb ない
is substituted as its negative form, in the same way that できる is substituted
as the potential of する.

Describing ない in English as an "auxiliary verb" doesn't make sense if we're
going to use the word "adjective" at all. Verbs conjugated with ない end with...
い, i.e., not a う-row kana; and they don't accept a を-marked direct object etc.

The remaining question is _why_ the conjugation works this way. To my
understanding, the mental model is that only the underlying "action" itself is
being negated, not the entire proposition. In English, it's natural to say
something like "I didn't tell the story", and "the story" is still a direct
object. But in the Japanese mindset, if you didn't speak, then the unsaid-
thing no longer merits the grammatical privilege of being marked with を. So
either the former direct object has to become a topic, or else the entire
proposition can be nominalized and its existence (although this doesn't feel
like quite the right word in English) then denied.
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In addition to what was said in other answers, I will mention that **ある** in
some other modern dialects and in Old/Middle/Classical Japanese has negative
form created in the same ways as other verbs.

In Kansai dialects (Ōsaka, Kōbe, Kyōto cities etc.), suffix **へん** (or **ひん**
for _-i_ -vowel stem verbs) is used after 未然形 (see
[1](http://www.kansaiben.com/3.BasicGrammar/1a.Verb/2.Grammar/1G.html),
[2](http://www.kansaiben.com/3.BasicGrammar/1a.Verb/2.Grammar/2G.html)):

Affirmative | Negative  
---|---  
ある | あらへん  
帰る（かえる） | 帰らへん（かえらへん）  
  
(About adjectives in Kansai, see
[3](http://www.kansaiben.com/3.BasicGrammar/4.Adjectives/2.Grammar/index.html),
[4](http://www.kansaiben.com/3.BasicGrammar/4.Adjectives/2.Grammar/2G.html).)

In Middle/Classical Japanese, suffix
[**ず**](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%9A) / **ぬ** is used after 未然形:

Affirmative Conclusive | Affirmative Attributive | Negative Conclusive |
Negative Attributive  
---|---|---|---  
あり / ある | ある | あらず | あらぬ  
歸る（かへる） | 歸る（かへる） | 歸らず（かへらず） | 歸らぬ（かへらぬ）
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