Why not?

Left school after nine again, no time for any translation, unfortunately, but per suggestion, I thought I'd add some thoughts on the language of the parts I've translated so far.

One was the incredible continuity you see in Japanese.

I thought this when I saw (chapter 1, first paragraph]：

物語といふ物のあんなるを、いかで見ばやと思いつつ, ...
I heard people saying there were these things called "tales", and wanting so much to read them, ...

I learned the -baya of mibaya there as being equivalent to the desiderative -tai, as in 行きたい, "I want to go". But when I translated this section, I thought it was strange that baya didn't seem to have an obvious connection to the mizenkei -ba meaning "if" like the modern ba. Checking the pocket electronic dictionary I would probably grab after my wallet in the next Big Earthquake, I was pleased to learn it did.

広辞苑 Koujien, sort of a Webster's with no remaining competition, derives it from the same -ba plus ya", an exclamatory particle like yo or na nowadays. Which means that rather than a fixed ending without much independent meaning like tai, baya was just the ancient echo of the modern ～ばいいな, a very common expression for desire that literally means, "if X was so-and-so, that would be swell". That same ba has now reemerged on the izenkei with a parasitic re, and ya has died out, but even a thousand years later, the nature of the language, its subconscious idiomatic tendencies and imperatives haven't changed very much at all in a lot of ways.