形容詞 that end in ～しい but were not シク活用 in 古文


I know that in general, if a 形容詞 in modern Japanese ends in ～しい, then it was
originally a シク活用形容詞, with 終止形 ～し and 連體形 ～しき. I also know that in the Late
Middle Japanese period, シク adjectives developed a 終止形 of ～しし, which then
merged with ～しき and evolved into modern ～しい. But I'm wondering whether there
were any ク活用形容詞 that currently end in ～しい; i.e., with classical 終止形 ～し
(preceded directly by another し in the adjective root) and 連體形 ～き (but again
preceded directly by し in the adjective root). It seems that just by random
chance some of these could have occurred.

Again, I am not referring to the ～しし 終止形 that developed for シク adjectives in
the Late Middle Japanese Period.

Thank you very much.




That's an interesting idea, but it actually couldn't have occurred by random
chance, because it was impossible for an Old Japanese /ku/ adjective to have a
stem ending in /-i/ (or, at least, no such words are attested).

A mild caveat to this: I once read (I forget where, sorry) that for many of
the adjectives that came down to us in the /siku/ group, we do not have
phonographic attestation in Old Japanese to prove that they _were_ in fact
/siku/ adjectives at that stage. We just assume that they were because that's
how they appear in Heian-period documents. So it's technically possible that
among the /siku/ adjectives there are a few that, in Old Japanese, were just
/ku/ adjectives with a stem ending in /-si/, and were reanalyzed in Middle
Japanese as /siku/ adjectives (roughly as you suggest could have happened).

However, given the apparent restriction on _any_ stems ending in /-i/, and
circumstantial evidence like the fact that /siku/ adjectives tend to be
semantically distinctive, describing subjective or psychological states, this
doesn't seem especially likely.

