今日の一番好きな言葉。

飛ばされる, tobasareru. Saw it in the Murray book; he defines it as to be blown away. To・bu (飛ぶ), flying, is a kanji I'm working on in shuuji. It's the third down in the image at right. (The others are kei and un/kumo; 景雲飛 is a group of three that I've been doing, though so far only in kaisho.)

The plethora of syllables in tobasareru makes me think that maybe this is tobu being wrung through a tense or two that I haven't learned yet. Something causative or passive or causative-passive. I've tried manipulating tobu into something that might work, but so far no luck. There's a passive feel to it, like suru/sareru, that suggests being an unwilling participant in flight.

That's something I don't yet understand well, like wataru vs watasu or okiru and okosu—the -ru form meaning acting for oneself and the -su form meaning acting upon someone else. I feel that there's a pattern there that I'll be really glad to know about once I do.

So, I guess,
橋を渡る, cross bridge
橋が渡れる, bridge can be crossed
橋が渡られる, bridge is crossed
橋を渡す, be conveyed across bridge

渡られる, be crossed, 渡す, be carried across

Now I'm confused, because a page I was just reading about the passive form says that you can passivize ichidan verbs by changing the final u to a and adding -reru. But doesn't that create the potential form? Eg, 食べる / 食べられる—am I saying that a thing is edible or that it's eaten (by some unspecified agent)?

Hmm.