The claim that I’ve read and heard from linguists about this is that while words like janpusuru are semantically verbs, grammatically they are a noun janpu + the standard verb suru.
Contrast the English expression “I am doing homework” vs. “I am *homeworking”. “Homework” isn’t really used as a verb in English, but we can express the idea of homework-as-an-action by saying “do homework”.
New non-suru verbs in Japanese do apparently happen from time to time (Wikipedia uses the example of guguru — “to google”) but they’re rare, so the class is mostly closed.
The claim that I’ve read and heard from linguists about this is that while words like janpusuru are semantically verbs, grammatically they are a noun janpu + the standard verb suru.
Contrast the English expression “I am doing homework” vs. “I am *homeworking”. “Homework” isn’t really used as a verb in English, but we can express the idea of homework-as-an-action by saying “do homework”.
New non-suru verbs in Japanese do apparently happen from time to time (Wikipedia uses the example of guguru — “to google”) but they’re rare, so the class is mostly closed.
That makes good sense.