On my trip home today, I was thinking about how うちに帰っている would be incorrect for my current situation, as I'm currently travelling home and not already at home. I'll walk through my thought process from here:
Consider 食べる:
食べる - I will eat
食べた - I ate (without proper grammar, "I eated")
食べている - I am eating
Often 帰る is translated as "to return", but copying the same transformations from the 食べる case is incorrect:
帰る - I will return
帰った - I returned
帰っている - [WRONG] I am returning
If we instead translate 帰る as "to be returned" (where "returned" here is intransitive), we still get proper meanings:
帰る - I will be returned
帰った - I have been returned
帰っている - [CORRECT] I am returned
So, I wondered if this was the case that all transitive verbs were "continuous" and all intransitive verbs were "discontinuous", but this is not the case: かぶる is transitive and "discontinuous", and 泳ぐ is intransitive and "continuous":
かぶる - I will don it
かぶった - I have donned it
かぶっている - I am (being donned) it
泳ぐ - I will swim
泳いだ - I have swum
泳いでいる - I am swimming
So my next question was "is this strictly an English phenomenon?". Rather, am I fixing a problem that only really exists in English by adding "to be" onto definitions?
Consider this timeline of 食べる:
食べた happens after 食べている, that is, 食べている describes the interval before 食べた.
This is not the same of 帰る:
帰っている describes the interval after 帰った. So, this is not strictly an English phenomenon to my understanding.
So, is there a name for categories A and B? Especially a name for them in Japanese?
A | B | |
---|---|---|
Transitive | 食べる | かぶる |
Intransitive | 泳ぐ | 帰る |