Essentially, this grammar point makes my ケツ itch. My problem with it is that I want a nominaliser in place before that も。
Generally, も follows a noun, nominaliser or pseudo noun/連用形 of sorts (I could list a few more cases, but you get the picture; to me, it just doesn’t fit here). This one straight up chills with a past tense verb. I know that it is ‘correct’. I just don’t know why.
I don’t mind exceptions/being wrong, so if someone could explain grammatically where this came from (if this is a vestigial from older constructions) or where my failure of logic is that makes this construction okay, I would be extremely grateful.
5 comments
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Just think of it like ～た方がいい。 Same general concept.
https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/4489/zero-nominalisation-why-and-when
tldr; sometimes they just don’t feel like using a nominalizer
Would it help if you thought of it as a similar construction to the phrase “She is beauty, she is grace.” ?
It doesn’t fit the “normal” English rules which would make one expect an article to go before a noun for at least the first phrase “She is a beauty” and doesn’t work for the second noun since “grace” is an attribute that someone possesses and not “is”.
Something like 負けたも当然, you can think of as 「負けた」も当然, with “負けた” being treated as a phrase that was turned into a noun. So like 「猿も木から落ちる」は有名なことわざです which also technically has a verb before the particle, but it’s being treated as a noun since you’re taking about the phrase itself.
They don’t seem to teach this for some reason but that の nominalizer everyone loves so much, it wasn’t a thing in classical Japanese. And the literary register of Japanese is based on classical Japanese. 同然/どうぜん has that juicy literary sino-Japanese reading and so we can expect that this is an expression inspired by literary Japanese and the expression not using の to nominalize is a further sign of that. The rule behind nominalization in classical Japanese is that if something is in the 連体形, i.e. the attributive form—the form that you put something in when you want to modify a noun, then it can be implicitly nominalized and used like a noun. There’s a saying 成るはいやなり、思うは成らず “What becomes is unfavorable; what one would favor becomes not”. In it, 成る and 思う are in the attributive form and are implicitly nominalized. The meaning is 成るものは/思うものは. You can imagine an invisible もの/人/の/etc after the verb in these cases.
That’s not to say every instance of implicit nominalization is “literary”. There are holdovers of it in the spoken language. Heck, the particle が when used as a conjunction can follow verbs and adjectives without the need to say のが. That’s a holdover from classical Japanese and the way が evolved. Compare with のに. Also note that のに’s に attaches directly to the suppositional: だろうに、でしょうに (not だろうのに、でしょうのに). Also the 〜たはいいが grammar uses implicit nominalization. You might also wonder why both なら and のなら exist—the former uses implicit nominalization. Of course due to association with のだ their nuances may be perceived differently in some cases.
Supplement: Past tense comes from てある->たる->た. So it too is a verb in the attributive form grammatically.