Potential Question

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Reply #1 - 2010 January 05, 1:10 pm
b0ng0 Member
From: Scotland Registered: 2008-12-04 Posts: 84

I was just looking at this sentence:

"カメラの電池が切れたので、新しい電池に交換した"
"Because the camera batteries ran out, I replaced them with new ones."

However, the 切れた is the potential form of 切る. Just thinking about it, I thought potential was the equivalent of "can" or "can't", for example これ食べられない.

Is this the passive form of the potential, e.g. 食べれた　＝　was eaten, whereas 食べられなかった　= couldn't eat.

Is the clue in the use of either が　or を？

Thank you for any help.

Reply #2 - 2010 January 05, 1:28 pm
Womacks23 Member
From: 恵比寿 Registered: 2008-01-10 Posts: 596

b0ng0 wrote:

However, the 切れた is the potential form of 切る.

Thank you for any help.

No it's not. Two different verbs. Hint, one is transitive and the other is intransitive. The overlapping conjugation is just coincidental and are tricky to spot sometimes.

You're welcome smile

Last edited by Womacks23 (2010 January 05, 1:38 pm)

Reply #3 - 2010 January 05, 5:50 pm
pm215 Member
From: UK Registered: 2008-01-26 Posts: 1354

Womacks23 is correct, but this caught my eye:

b0ng0 wrote:

Is this the passive form of the potential, e.g. 食べれた　＝　was eaten, whereas 食べられなかった　= couldn't eat.

I have no idea what you mean by "the passive form of the potential", but I think it might be helpful for you to have a look at a verb conjugation chart, because you seem to be confusing several things here.

Firstly,  食べる and 切る do not conjugate in the same way, because 食べる is ichidan and 切る is godan, so you can't use one as an example to reason about the other. Secondly, the colloquial short form of an ichidan verb like 食べれる must be the potential; the passive is always 食べられる.

切れる (if not the intransitive verb) : potential ("can cut")
切られる: passive ("is cut by")
食べられる: either passive or potential
食べれる: potential (conversational form)

Also, don't be deceived by Rikaichan, which will happily mark forms as "potential or passive" even for godan verbs where they cannot be potential forms.

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Reply #4 - 2010 January 05, 8:02 pm
liosama Member
From: sydney Registered: 2008-03-02 Posts: 896

Isn't this also a contextual sort of issue as well?


カメラの電池が切れたので、新しい電池に交換した"
"Because the camera batteries ran out, I replaced them with new ones."

I mean there is no chance this could be the potential form of 切る--> 切れる、because this sentence (to me anyway) wouldn't make much sense at all. The 新しい電池に交換した is a giveaway to the fact that something died out. Would a ～てしまった here be appropriate or excessive?


Anyway I like to think of this verb as like another 見える and those other confusing potential-look-a-like exceptions. (Is that wrong to do as well?)

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