I know ず and ぬ are both archaic negative forms, but I’ve never heard/can’t find anything that says ず is a conjugation of ぬ? From what I’ve seen ず seems to be very common in books as the negative counterpart to verb stem conjunctive form, or as a formal replacement for ないで (without doing). And like you said using ぬ is a way to emphasize old-fashionedness, the way we might throw “thou” into an English sentence.
Also, I see ん replacing ない all the time in casual speech. Does this really specifically come from the ぬ form? I thought it was more a contraction of ない.
It’s kinda complicated, but they’re the same verb (also if you’ve seen stuff like 〜ざる, that’s also the basically the same verb). you can probably argue about what’s a conjugation of what exactly, but ぬ came first.
Definitely some cool reads! 〜ざる is one of those grammar points that I learned ages ago and have yet to come across once (although Imabi calls it common ). Diving into the etymology here might be pretty interesting and finally tie this seemingly unreasonable number of old negative forms together.
):
). Diving into the etymology here might be pretty interesting and finally tie this seemingly unreasonable number of old negative forms together.
