「氷が効かなくなってきている」

I came across the phrase「氷が行かなくなってきている」in an episode of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure and couldn’t help but smile at it. The morphology of Japanese words is a fascinating one, and this sentence exemplifies it brilliantly. Roughly, this sentence says “the ice is becoming ineffective”, or more naturally, “the ice is becoming less effective”. The first word 「氷」, is straightforward; it means “ice”. The particle 「が」 is an indicative particle meant to direct the attention of the listener to the noun it is attached to.

Now here comes the interesting part: the final 「効かなくなってきている」. The base of this phrase is 「効く」, which means “to be effective, to function, to work”. From here, the verb is morphed to its negative 「効かない」. Of course, this means “to not be effective”. One cool things about Japanese is that most words that end in 「い」morph like 「ーい」adjectives. One such way 「ーい」adjective morph is by replacing the い with く. This morph is typically described as turning the adjective into an adverb, but the idea of turning a negative-conjugated verb into an adverb is a bit mysterious, especially since no such pattern exists in english. Now we’re left with 「効かなく」.

Now that we have an “adverb”, we need a verb for it to describe. This is where 「なる」comes in. The entire last part 「なってきている」is a morph of this verb, which means “to become”. 「なる」 becomes 「なって」, which is a special morph (called -te form) of verbs that can set up a number of new morphs. From here we add the verb 「来る」, which means “to come to be”. From 「なって来る」 we then turn the 「来る」 into its -te form, yielding 「なってきて」. (It’s worth nothing that this construction is usually written in kana, hence I drop the kanji.) The final addition is the verb 「いる」. When this verb is added to the -te form of another verb, it expresses an enduring state of action. Oftentimes this translated to the present progressive form in english, e.g. run -> running.

So we’re left with 「なってきている」, which roughly means “is becoming”. The nuance of the 「きて」 is sadly lost since there is no real way to directly translate this to english.

When I first heard this sentence it took me some seconds to parse. As an english native speaker, I’m not used to having to listen this long to a single phrase to glean its meaning. Let’s take a different approach to illustrate how long words can be constructed.

Remember the 「ーい」 adjective morphs I mentioned? It turns out that the negative of an 「ーい」 adjective is also an 「ーい」 adjective! As such, there is theoretically no upper bound to how long of a “word” you can grammatically correctly construct in Japanese.

The construction is simple: take an 「ーい」 adjective and negate it. The way to do this is change the final 「い」 to 「くない」. Repeat. For example with the word 「よい」, meaning “good”, we can negate it twice to the word meaning “not not good”:

よい ー> よくない ー> よくなくない

But the final word here is also an 「ーい」 adjective. This means that this is also a grammatically correct construction:

よくなくなくなくなくなくなくなくなくなくなくなくなくない

Repeat as needed to construct as long of a word as you want. Of course, we’ve long left the issue of pragmatism behind, but still, it’s pretty not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not cool, huh?