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The following exchange happens in a manga:

A: お前の言う事を私に...信じろと?

B:　貴様の自由だ。俺も立場を危ぶめている.

I know the word 危ぶむ but couldn't find dictionary entries for 危ぶめる. I considered the possibility that it's just the potential form of 危ぶむ but it doesn't seem to fit in the context. Is 危ぶめる just a nonstandard equivalent of 危ぶむ?

Eiríkr Útlendi
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ssuga
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1 Answers1

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I think you're right that it's not the potential form of the godan verb 危ぶむ. However, the verb 危ぶむ has two forms (from 大辞林):

一（ 動マ五［四］ ）(godan/yodan)
    .....
二（ 動マ下二 ）(shimo nidan)
危ない状態にする。 「国家を－・めんとする物／平家 5」

In particular, the second definition is a shimo nidan verb, which is related to the modern-day ichidan verb. We can look here for how a shimo nidan verb is conjugated:

ma gyou shimo ni dan

ている attaches to a verb's 連用形 form, which for this shimo nidan verb would be 危ぶめ. Thus, we would get 危ぶめている, which is the word you saw in your sentence. The word in your sentence comes from definition 2 above.

Ringil
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  • Some complementary questions:
    1. Are nidan/yodan verbs still in use in modern Japanese?
    2. I think I rember reading that ている is a somewhat recent development in Japanese and classically たり was the conjugation used. Would this use in the manga be considered anachronistic since it mixes classical and modern Japanese?
     – ssuga Jul 29 '20 at 18:29
  • This answer has some more background on it https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/18585/why-are-the-verb-classes-called-ichidan-and-godan, but yeah generally speaking nidan -> ichidan and yodan -> godan.
    • – Ringil Jul 29 '20 at 20:21
  • @ssuga 2. Yes ている is fairly recent. I think a lot of manga have weird stuff like this, but I don't know enough about the timelines to say if it's anachronistic or not. Maybe they were both used historically at the same time, or maybe the manga author just wanted to add some old flavor but use conjugations normal people would understand. – Ringil Jul 29 '20 at 20:27