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I am reading "Essential Japanese Grammar" (from Dover) by Everett F. Bleiler. The section about the consonant conjugation lists some verb examples in their present form with corresponding basic stems next to them:

PRESENT FORM            BASIC STEM
shimau      to finish   shima-*
kau         to buy      ka-*
iu          to say      i-*
omou        to think    omo-*

* Strictly speaking these stems end in a -w-; for convenient exposition we can ignore this -w-.

I just don't get it. Where is this -w- supposed to be? It has hyphens on both sides, which means it's not a suffix or prefix, it is implied to stand in between other letters. The only place I can imagine this -w- appear is right before the -u, correct me if I am wrong.

What's your take on this? What do they mean? By the way, there is a handful of other verbs in that table right after the ones I listed. They are not marked with the star and all end in -ru. (In case you wondered what was meant by "convenient exposition.")

Thank you.

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    I assume they are referring to the fact that 買う becomes 買わない to avoid doubling the 'a' sound. Similarly, one says 言わない to avoid having the 'i' and 'a' sounds clash.
    – Saegusa
    Commented Jul 2 at 16:40
  • @Saegusa, for some reason the contents of my message do not display correctly. There's some interference, I don't know what causes it (must be some characters). I apologize. And thank you for you comment.
    – bp2017
    Commented Jul 2 at 16:42

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The term 'stem' when it comes to Japanese usually refers to the so-called 連用形 'continuative form' of a verb. In Modern Japanese, there are two types of verbs (outside of exceptions), 一段 'ichidan' and 五段 'godan'. The first ones are sometimes called 'ru-verbs' and the second ones 'u-verbs' since the first type always end in る. In the case of 一段 verbs, the stem is found by dropping る, for instance 閉める becomes 閉め. In the case of 五段 verb, change the last 'u' hiragana into its corresponding 'i' hiragana, for instance 買う becomes 買い.

This is usually what is called the 'stem' of the verb. Your book seems to use the word 'stem' more generally to refer to any kind of verb base, which is somewhat unusual. In this case, it is referring to the 未然形, the verb base associated with the negative form in Japanese (among other things). For 一段 verbs, nothing changes but for 五段 verbs, you need to change the last 'u' hiragana into its corresponding 'a' hiragana. There is one exception: if the final hiragana is う, we use わ instead to avoid having clashing vowel sounds, for instance 買う becomes 買わ(+ない in the negative). This is what your textbook is referring to, and it's true for the other verbs you list: 言う becomes 言わない, 思う becomes 思���ない, etc. Notice how the 'w' sounds is in between the kanji and the okurigana, I assume this is why they wrote it -w-.

If you would like to know more about the 連用形, the stem of Japanese verbs, please check this question.

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    @bp2017, they say "w" because of historical sound changes in Japanese. See also this other post of mine about the "h" kana.
    – Eiríkr Útlendi
    Commented Jul 2 at 23:00
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    In linguistics (and presumably used so in that book), stem is "part" of given word without inflectional affixes, but it does not need to be equal to any form (including lemma) of that word, does not need to follow phonotactic rules for words in given language, and does not even need to be strict subset of any form of that word. Stems of consonant-stem verbs (五段), as name implies, end with consonants. E.g. karu has stem kar-, and kau (Old Japanese kapu) has stem kaw- (Old Japanese kap-).
    – Arfrever
    Commented Jul 3 at 0:20
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    There were /we/, /wi/, /wo/ sounds in Japanese, but in Old Japanese (8th century) maybe there were no verbs whose stems ended in /w/. At some time (second part of 10th century according to Frellesvig), intervocalic and usually morpheme-medial /p/ changed to /w/, and automatically disappeared before /u/ (e.g. 川: /kapa/ → /kawa/, 返る: /kaperu/ → /kaweru/, 買ふ: /kapu/ → /kau/). Hiragana and katakana were created somewhen during Middle Japanese, and retroactively using them for Old Japanese is not very good idea, since Old Japanese had more vowels or semivowel-vowel sequences.
    – Arfrever
    Commented 2 days ago
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    @bp2017 It’s very useful to have a basic grasp of the historical sound changes in Japanese, as they can help make sense of a lot of things that otherwise look odd or irregular. As Arfrever’s says, these verbs have inflectional stems that end in -w-, so it’s really kaw-, etc. The original /p/ turned into /w/ between vowels, so /kap-V/ → /kaw-V/ (then later disappeared before /e i o u/); but before another consonant, it remained /p/ and the two assimilated, so past tense /kap-ta/ → /katta/. This is why these verbs (which otherwise look like vowel stems now) have -tt- in the past tense.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented 2 days ago
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    @bp2017 And also remember that the inflectional stems of verbs are completely unrelated to kana. Verbs had abstract inflectional stems long before Japanese was written down. Kana reflect how Middle and Modern Japanese phonotactics work at the surface level, but stems are not surface-level entities. A verb like 待つ matsu ‘wait’ has the stem mat-, which never appears as a standalone form – it only shows up in the 未然形 and 仮定形/命令形. I would recommend reading the Wikipedia page on Japanese verb categories to understand the system.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented 2 days ago

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