I’m super out of it at the moment I am writing this thread so pardon if it reads weird
ok so the phrase i’m reading is 蘇りし棋聖の魂 which I think means ‘soul of a resurrected go saint’ and if the only thing I’m doing is reading then I’m satisfied with that (btw there is no official translation of this text and no fan translation either as far as I know so I’m on my own)
but what I’m also doing is specifically trying to analyze the grammatical features, and 蘇りし perplexes me because 蘇り appears to be the whole word, but then there is し and I don’t know what it’s doing (maybe turning the noun into an adjective but I have never seen anything like this before) mostly because I can’t look it up and get the right し because I’m sure it is not ‘list of reasons’ し
The closest I have gotten is guessing that maybe it is an archaism? that is, perhaps it is 終止形 of classical japanese adjective? but I am not certain of this and need a second opinion
ok so heres what I gleaned from what they shared: し in this case is not a particle or ending as I thought but a verb!!! its 終止形 (final ending form) is き while its 連体形 is し (i made a mistake and used the wrong term in OP). 連体形 just means “form that attributes this word to the phrase which it precedes”. Also now that I’m seeing this in action in classical japanese, I’m understanding imabi’s explanation of the base forms a lot better (which were originally near the beginning of the text but they seem to have moved it to way later in the text).
As for what き actually means: it is an auxillary verb that reflects on the fact that the preceding verb happened in the distant past, so in 蘇りし棋聖 the go saint was resurrected a long time ago and this is a personal event on which the text is reflecting.
I’m not an expert on this at all but that’s what I’m getting out of this. Very cool to know and I’m glad I encountered it! Also I’m proud of myself for realizing it might be classical japanese <3
ETA:
Recently in the history of Japanese, the 連体形 merged with the 終止形, causing the latter to look like the former for many things. For instance, the 終止形 of する used to be す, and the 連体形 was する. This also effected some auxiliaries. For instance, べし → べきだ, ず → ぬ. (source)
oh this explains why I was confused about the two at first. Since in classical japanese it’s more obvious that they are different, I understand better now.