Some recent posts here reminded me about something from many, many years ago: how do you form concatenated causatives in Japanese?
If I want to say, "Make me go", I would say, 行かせて. That seems pretty clear. Or maybe even 行かせ since this is a pretty blunt thing to say (ie, you wouldn't want to say something like this to your parents or boss without potentially creating a lot of problems). But between friends or peers, it can be a joke or a kind of stubborn refusal to cooperate with someone.
But how would you say, "Make me make you go"? But, I'm not sure 行かせさせて renders this correctly.
How do you make clear who's making who go? English nests things in a way that you can follow who's making whom make whom do whatever. But, I'm simultaneous the one making "you" do something for which you are then making "me" do something. So, at that point, I get lost. A crude attempt might be
私が、あなたに、私に行かせさせて
Yet that sounds about as clear as mud! Convoluted and just not very natural sounding in Japanese IMHO.
Decades ago, this matter originally came up as a strange/difficult thing to translate into Japanese when I was new to Japanese and was basically trying to explain to my Japanese friend the joke behind this sort of nonsense. I don't know that I ever managed to explain it at all.
Truthfully, this "make me make you" or "make me make you make him" etc. is more a verbal polemic in English. It's more likely to be heard on the playground among kids as a threat of sorts than between serious adults. Between adults, it would most likely be a joke; if it wasn't a joke, then between adults it just sounds extremely immature.
As a joke the concatenated causatives can get quite long and absurd: make him make me make you make her go. I'm not even sure that a native English speaker really follows all of this... it just becomes a kind of absurd joke or in-your-face verbal assault.
My point being: this is perhaps a linguistic polemic more natural to English than to other languages.
Is this sort of concatenated verbiage easily done in Japanese ("easily" meaning, in a manner that it would be naturally understood)? If so, how would you do it?
Some very interesting links have been provided in the comments, but the linked questions and answers don't quite match nicely with what I'm trying to get at here. I think that's in part my fault for how I framed the question in terms of make me make you.
But here's a perfectly understandable, though convoluted, concatenation of causation in English that I wouldn't know how to start expressing in Japanese (except very clunkily).
So imagine the situation: my brother-in-law dislikes me, but he's coming to my birthday party nevertheless. He won't talk to me, so he gets my sister (his wife) to talk to me. My mom is very proud of her ability to bake, but her pride is misplaced. Her cakes taste horrendously. So, my brother-in-law wants to make sure, since he dislikes me so much, that at least the cake will not further contribute to his displeasure. So, this is what I wound up telliing my cousin about what happened: (a convoluted background story for a convoluted point of grammar that very easily flows in English)
My brother-in-law made my sister make me make my mom not bake a cake for my birthday, but instead buy one.
How would one even begin to say this in Japanese?
In fact, the matter of the causative might be incidental because in English this also could have been worded without a causative:
He asked my sister to ask me to ask mom not to....
But, let's just stick with the matter of causatives here. Perhaps extra-credit for someone to also come up with the concatenation of "asking".
