How to differentiate “edible” and “can eat”?

3 comments

1. This isn’t about the potential form of verbs, but about the fact that in Japanese, the nominative and accusative case are not distinguished when topicalized.

   Even without the potential form “魚は食べる。” can both mean “The fish eats.” and “<something> eats the fish.”. This is because “〜は” like many other particles replaces “〜が” and “〜を” but comes after other particles so the difference disappears.

   But, it’s more complex I suppose here in that potential verbs traditionally take a nominative-object, rather than an accusative one, which makes the difference less obvious even when it not be the topic. “魚が食べられる。” indeed can both mean “It is the fish that eats.” and “<something else> can eat the fish.”, however “魚を食べられる。” always means “<something else> can eat the fish.” since potential verbs, except for “できる” can also take accusative objects.

   But, luckily, transitive potential verbs can also take dative subjects, so one could say “魚には食べられる。” which does mean “The fish can eat.”, except, it can also mean “It is eaten by the fish.” because the potential form of ru-verbs just happens to be identical to their passive, which use “〜に” for the agent.

   In fact, even for u-verbs, the verb can still have another argument that already takes the dative case. So “私には持っていける。” can both mean “I can take it.” or “<something else> can take it to me.”

   Outside of potential verbs, there are many other verbs that have both their subject and object in the nominative case, or may have their subject in either the nominative or the dative, or their object in the nominative or the accusative, and the rule generally is that this has to coincidence so dative/accusative is not allowed, but all other combinations are, so this is always ambiguous.

   And of course, the dative case in general is heavily overloaded, fulfilling many different functions.

   Essentially, Japanese cases are highly, highly overloaded, fulfilling multiple syntactic functions, and on top of that the difference between nominative and accusative is eliminated for topics, and on top of that in casual speech cases are often dropped altogether, probably because they often aren’t needed to understand things, because it’s actually context and word order that is the important thing, not cases.

   That having been said, I don’t actually know to this day when 皓 said “あんたは誰も救えない。” in *いぬやしき* whom he was talking to, and whether he meant “You can’t save anyone.” or “Nobody can save you.”.

2. Just to confirm, *can* the potential form be used to mean “can be [verb]ed” without a particular person (subject) in mind? When I check a Jp->En dictionary (Takoboto app for Android), it claims 食べられる can be used as a rentaishi to mean “to be edible, to be good to eat”, which is a strange thing to note if the potential form could already be used that way in the first place.

   EDIT: As I look into this more, I think the answers just yes, and the dictionary is being dumb.

3. Does “The turkey is ready to eat.” mean that the turkey is cooked, or hungry?

   How about “The kids are ready to eat”?

   What is this person asking?
   https://okwave.jp/amp/qa/q9324489.html

   In the case that it is truly ambiguous in context, yes, you would rephrase or add stuff.