When i learned German, it was pretty easy to spot familiar prefixes, suffixes, and other morphemes within verbs that helped me understand why they mean what they mean, and there were lots of tutorial videos about this online as well. In Japanese, however, I have noticed that verbs (excluding compound verbs and transitive/intransitive or self-move/other-move pairs) almost never have any parts that I can recognize. Every new verb I learn feels like it was conjured out of thin air.
For example, today I learned そそのかす and 装う. Both are relatively long words with complex meanings, and i would expect them to be derived from other, simpler verbs or nouns, but i haven’t found any easily accessible information about this and none of the japanese learning youtube channels seem to cover this.
2 comments
A ton of verbs end in こむ, and I read this finally and it made more sense
https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/komu-compound-verbs/
I like to study words from an etymological perspective so I often encounter the same issue. Japanese etymology seems convoluted and it’s hard to find good sources on it.
Like, it’s clear to me that 絞る (しぼる), 縛る (しばる), and 閉める/締める (しめる) share a common root because of the phonetic and semantic similarity but it’s hard to find any source that properly explains it.
Sometimes if you search ‘word+語源’ or ‘word+由来’ on google, you’ll see some relevant results.
As for そそのかす, ~あす is similar to ~させる and it’s used to make verbs transitive. So it’s safe to safe the original verb was probably “そそのく” however this isn’t attested in any dictionary. I found this source (https://chisikiyoku.com/唆す/) that says it’s either
1. from “それそれ” which is a sound that’s used to get animals to move.
2. or that the そそ is a variation of せかせか and related to 急かせる (せかせる) and のかす is from 退く (のく) + ~あす.