Here's a paragraph from a Miyagi Michio essay, Junsui no koe 純粋の声 ("Voices of purity"):

或る日音楽学校で、私の作曲したものを箏曲科の学生に歌わせたことがあった。何れも女学校を卒業した者か、またはそれ位の年頃の者であったが、その声の良し悪しは別として、それが非常に純粋な響きで私の胸を打つものがあった。唄が朗詠風のものであったので、私は歌わせていながら、何だか自分が天国に行って、天女のコーラスを聴いているような、何ともいいがたい感じがした。私は或るレコードで、バッハのカンタータを聴いたことがあるが、そのカンタータのコーラスが、わざわざ少女を集めてコーリングしたので、曲もそうであるが、普通のコーラスとは別の感じがして、私はその演奏に打たれたことがあった。私はその時、これから少女たちの声を入れたものを作曲してみたいと思った。

One day at music school I had students from the koto department sing one of my compositions. All were graduates from girls' schools or around that age [mid/late teens], and, as a separate matter from the merits or deficiencies of each voice, I was struck by the extreme purity of the overall sound. The song was in a traditional recitative style [朗詠風], the impression I received as they sang was quite indescribable, as if I had gone to heaven and was listening to a choir of celestial maidens [天女]. I once heard a record of a Bach cantata the kōringu of which had been performed by a choir made up exclusively of young girls. I was struck not only by the work itself but also the fact that the feeling was entirely different from a normal choir. That was when I decided I wanted to try composing works that included parts for girls' voices.

This was written in 1935; a dedicated music historian could probably make an educated guess as to which exact recording Miyagi heard.

Anyway, what interested me about this passage was the use of the word kōringu, which is obviously not from any premodern strata of Japanese. The most obvious interpretation is that it is a straight loan of "calling" from English, but it seems to be used here to mean either "performance" or "recording" and neither of these meanings quite fit "calling". I wondered if it might be some scribal error for rekōdingu, but Google Books shows it uncorrected in multiple collections containing this essay, as well as a 1935 Kawabata Yasunari essay also called Junsui no koe, published in Fujin Kōron magazine and later collected in Nihon no bi no kokoro 日本の美のこころ ("The heart/soul of Japanese aesthetics"). Kawabata's essay uses Miyagi's as a launching pad for some of his own thoughts on girls, purity, and Miyagi, and quotes the passage above without comment — so if kōringu is an error, it isn't a glaringly obvious one. Still, I can't find any other examples of the word being used in this way, which is suspicious.

Naturally, more exotic theories explaining the word do come to mind. For example: the Japanese for "[European art music-style] choir" is kōrasu , from English chorus, so maybe this is the -ing form of a backformed pseudo-English verb to chor, def. "sing as a choir", or the result of a mistaken assumption that call was that word, based on the similarity when kanafied. Before I wander too far into the wilds, though, does anyone have any wisdom to impart?

Mugechinashi: good Edo word. Koshigaya Gozan includes it in his Butsurui shōko 物類称呼 as an Eastern (東國) way to say nasakenashi (which is to say "heartless" or "cruel"; the more common contemporary meanings of "pathetic" or "shameful" were still apparently a few decades away in 1775; the first such citation in the Nihon Kokugo Daijiten is from 1813, in Ukiyodoko).

Gozan even offers an etymology for mugechinashi, including a locus classicus in the Nirvana sūtra:

涅槃經二「佛性者名曰無礙智」とあれは佛性のなきといふ事なるべし

In the Nirvana sūtra, it is written: "Those of Buddha-nature are called mugechi"; therefore [the word] must [originally?] refer to someone without Buddha-nature.

There is a slight problem with this etymology, though: the quoted passage doesn't appear to actually be in the Nirvana sūtra, or at least any easily searchable version online today. Perhaps for this reason, the Nihon Kokugo Daijiten cites the Butsurui shōko in its entry for mugechinai, but leaves out the sutra quotation entirely. Instead, there is a note placing mugechinai in the context of an extended family of /mug-/ words dating from the Kamakura period (mugoi has survived to the present day), without offering any speculation as to the roots of the /mug-/ morpheme itself.

It must be admitted, though, that even if 無礙智 is not defined so neatly in the Nirvana sūtra, it is a Buddhist term of art. It is used with a slightly different spelling in the term 四無碍智, for example, usually translated "four unobstructed knowledges" or "... wisdoms." The four are, roughly, knowledge of the dharma (法無碍智), knowledge of the meaning of the dharma (義無碍智), knowledge of different languages (辞無碍智), and knowledge of how to use the preceding three to preach freely (楽説無碍智). Together these are indeed identified with Buddha-nature (see Kim Young-tae's "Wŏnhyo's Conception of Buddha-nature in the Thematic Essential of the Mahāpariṇirvāṇa-sūtra", p199, for example).

The word 無礙智 also appears on its own. For example, it's in the steak-knives speech Mañjuśrī delivers when he first appears in the Angulimāliya sūtra and Angulimāl[y]a asks him what he means by all this "emptiness, emptiness" business ("空空有何義"). Here's the SAT Daizōkyō Text Database version, translated by me, with English equivalents for technical terms mostly according to Charles Muller's Digital Dictionary of Buddhism:

T0120_.02.0527b07: 諸佛如虚空 虚空無有相
T0120_.02.0527b08: 諸佛如虚空 虚空無生相
T0120_.02.0527b09: 諸佛如虚空 虚空無色相
T0120_.02.0527b10: 法猶如虚空 如來妙法身
T0120_.02.0527b11: 智慧如虚空 如來大智身
T0120_.02.0527b12: 如來無礙智 不執不可觸
T0120_.02.0527b13: 解脱如虚空 虚空無有相
T0120_.02.0527b14: 解脱則如來 空寂無所有
T0120_.02.0527b15: 汝央掘魔羅 云何能了知

The Buddhas are like the void: the void has no mark of existence
The Buddhas are like the void: the void has no mark of arising
The Buddhas are like the void: the void has no mark of form
The dharma is also like the void: the Tathāgata's marvelous dharma body
Wisdom is like the void: the Tathāgata's great wisdom body
The Tathāgata has unimpeded wisdom, is free of attachments, cannot be apprehended
Liberation is like the void: the void has no mark of existence
Liberation is the Tathāgata: empty and non-existent
How could you, Angulimāla, fully understand this?

Given all those other /mug-/ words, it strikes me as extremely unlikely that mugechinashi comes directly from the Buddhist jargon. (Not least because the meaning is incorrect: the connection to kindness or mercy would be secondhand at best, via the general perfection of the Tathāgata.) I suppose that if the word mugechi was known outside the temples, though, it might have acted as a mold into which the /mug-/ morpheme was poured somewhere along the line.

Here's a quotation from Ifukube Akira 伊福部昭, found in Kobayashi Atsushi's enjoyable if non-technical Gojira no ongaku ゴジラの音楽 ("The music of Godzilla"). It's sourced to a 1995 "statement at Ifukube's residence," so I suppose it was an interview conducted by Kobayashi himself.

At first, the sound crew tried to create it by processing the voices of real animals. They apparently went to a zoo and recorded the voices of lions, tigers, elephants, condors, night herons, and so on, but they couldn't come up with a sound that was it. Nothing was the right voice for Godzilla. It makes sense: mammals have mammalian voices, no matter what; birds will always have avian voices. That was when I suggested using the longitudinal vibration on a contrabass string. Stringed instruments normally use latitudinal vibration and maintain fixed pitches, but we tried rubbed this string lengthwise with a leather glove covered with pine sap instead of a bow. Or to put it another way, we gripped it and pulled. When we did that, the tension changed while the string was sounding, and we got a complex noise like we'd never heard before. We got that down on tape and then Minawa [Ichirô]-san in Sound Effects processed it. And that was Godzilla's voice.

A bit lower down, assistant director Tokoro Kenji 所健二 clarifies: they did add the animal cries on top of the contrabass string. (Also, they had to record them at night, because it was too noisy in Ueno Zoo during the day, but that meant getting the zoo attendants to do things like poke sleeping lions with sticks.)

Nice post by Claire Bowern at Fully (sic) about a pile of early documentation of native Australian languages uncovered in the NSW State Library. Kind of stunning to realize that this sort of thing was still sitting on a library shelf waiting to be found. Here's hoping the digitization goes ahead!

An interesting entry from Koshigaya Gozan 越谷吾山's 1775 dialect dictionary, Butsurui shōko 物類称呼 ("Names for things, by type"):

こめ（よね） ◯遠江國天龍の川上にて○ぼさつと稱す（此所にては 米といはずしてぼさつとのみとなふ）按に 諸國より大峰或は羽黑山なとへ詣るもの 一七日齋す 其内はぼさつと稱して米とは呼ずとなん 西國又は朝鮮の方言にも 穀 を菩薩と云よし見えぬ 『東雅』に『雜林類事』を引て 白米を漢菩薩といひ、栗を田菩薩といふを記せりと有 又俗間に糠味噌といふは 糠と鹽を和して制れるを名づけて さゝぢん と云 是は佛經を書寫する早書の法に 菩薩の二字の艸冠のみをとりて としるす事有 さればさゝとはぼさつの義にて 是も又米を ぼさつ といふ事によれる也

Rice: In the upper reaches of the Tenryū River in Tōtōmi Province, they call rice bosatsu ["Bodhisattva"]. (They do not use the word kome here, but only bosatsu.) It seems to me that whenever someone comes on pilgrimage from any province to Mount Ōmine, Mount Haguro, etc., during the 17-day abstention period, they call rice bosatsu and do not use the word kome. One also sees reports that in the western provinces and in Korea, people call grains bosatsu. Tōga ["Eastern elegance", an Edo-period work on linguistics], quotes Gyerim yusa [a 12th-century Chinese source on Korean language — note that I am assuming that the 雜林類事 I see in my Iwanami Edition is somebody's type-/brusho for 鷄林類事] in saying that white rice is called kanbosatsu ("Han bodhisattva") and millet denbosatsu ("paddy bodhisattva"). Additionally, in everyday speech, nukamiso is known as sasajin ("bamboo grass and dust"), because it is made by combining rice bran with salt. This in turn refers to the sutra-copying shorthand by which the two characters for bodhisattva are reduced to their grass radicals, which are then combined into a single character like so: . This being the case, sasa ("bamboo grass") has the meaning bodhisattva [in sasajin]. This in turn has the meaning "rice".

Koshigaya lists a few more abbreviations like this, including:

• ten bosatsu, or "bosatsu with a dot". This is a symbol for bodai (= bodhi)
• Two katakana me characters, which for some reason abbreviates shōmon 聲聞 (= śrāvaka)
• Two katakana yo characters, which abbreviates engaku 縁覚 (= pratyekabuddha)