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meaning of "ikimimasen"

dther

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10 May 2019
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i had a dream the other day, and i was waking up, the word "ikimimasen" came to me.

i'm not sure if it was like, some fragment of from when i read shogun last year, i know "masen" means you put like, "i do not" on whatever the verb is.

did some googling and found that it likely means "i do not live" or "i do not bear down" (as in to push while giving birth).

is this a common word? does it mean one of those two things? is it a common way to say either of those things?
 
Dther,

I am wondering if the word you heard was "ikimasen", which means "I don't go" or "I won't go."
 
that might make more sense given how likely it is i may have read that phrase in the book, but in the dream it was definitely ikimimasen. does that phrase not really make sense? when i plug it into google to english and back the phrase is several words long instead of just a conjugated verb.
 
dther,

The base verb for ikimimasen would be ikimiru. According to Google Translate, there is such a verb, 行き見る, "go and see".


So ikimimasen could mean "I won't go and see" or "I don't go and see".

Does this make sense to you in your context?
 
The base verb for ikimimasen would be ikimiru. According to Google Translate, there is such a verb, 行き見る, "go and see".

Google Translate isn't a dictionary, much less a reliable one. Just because you can put something in there and have it spit out English, that doesn't mean that the input is necessarily grammatical Japanese.

I am seeing no instances of the verb 行き見る(いきみる) in native Japanese dictionaries, only 行き廻る (read ゆきみる), which is certainly not a common expression.


this page says ikimu is the root verb, how do you know the difference?


息みます(read いきみます) is definitely a valid conjugation of 息む and while it's not a common word, you can find enough examples of it being used by native speakers if you Google it. (Perhaps unsurprisingly given the meaning, many of the contexts seem to be related to childbirth.)
 
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As jt_-san pointed out, 行き見る doesn't work as a single compound verb. It can be used as 行き、見る, i.e., two actions connected by the continuous usage of the -masu stem, but the destination is necessary for naturalness in this case (e.g. 映画館に行き、見る). The -te form (e.g. 映画館に行って、見る) is more common even for this usage, though.

行き廻る "Yukimiru" is a classical verb. The example in the dictionary is quoted from 万葉集, an anthology nearly 1400 years before. Actually, I've never seen that verb.

Indeed いきむ "ikimu" is used mostly for childbirth, but I can't think of a reasonable situation where "ikimimasen" is used. An imperative form いきんで! "Ikinde!" is often said by doctors or nurses in childbirth scenes, just like "Push!" in English.

In conclusion, "ikimimasen" is valid and grammatical as a polite negative form of "ikimu", but this form is rarely used in real conversation.
 
thanks so much you guys. i was so weirded out when google told me it meant "i do not live". how spooky
 
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