Following last week\u2019s opaque and diffuse system<\/a>, here\u2019s another recent one from Thomas Pellard: \u201cA (more) comparative approach to some Japanese etymologies<\/a>\u201d (PDF available from here<\/a>).<\/p>\n Great reading as always, especially for the mass of data from the southern branches of Japonic it supplies. My only objection is that the proposed etymological connections to Ainu feel way underbaked. As far as I can tell (from text and bibliography), Pellard picked up Tamura Suzuko\u2019s dictionary of the Saru dialect of Ainu\u2014which admittedly is probably the best single Ainu dictionary there is\u2014and looked through it for words that sounded kind of the same. I\u2019ve got no problem with this procedure as an ideas generator, but I don\u2019t think it\u2019s justified to take casual findings like this and present them as something that \u201ccould hardly be a coincidence.\u201d The first rule of historical linguistics is that absolutely everything can be and probably is a coincidence, and that goes double when you’re cold-searching a dictionary.<\/p>\n That said, I don\u2019t necessarily mean to argue that every link Pellard proposes is wrong. It\u2019s a bit more complicated than that. Take as an example OJ pira<\/i> ( > NJ hira<\/i>). This would usually be glossed \u201cflat\u201d but Pellard has issues with its appearance in some mountain terminology, e.g. yomo tu pirasaka<\/i> in the Kojiki<\/cite>:<\/p>\n The word p\u00eera-saka<\/i> is surprising, since the semantic spelling of the Nihon shoki clearly means \u2018flat slope\/hill,\u2019 and the root p\u00eera<\/i> is indeed well attested in Japanese with the meaning \u2018flat.\u2019 The same oxymoron is seen in other toponyms such as p\u00eera-yama<\/i> \u2018flat mountain\u2019 (\u5e73\u5c71, MYS 9.1715), p\u00eera-woka<\/i> \u2018flat hill\u2019 (\u679a\u5ca1 Norito 394, \u6bd4\u826f\u4e4e\u52a0 Wamy\u014d ruijush\u014d Genna vi-v6).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n First of all, I\u2019m not convinced that this is even an oxymoron. “Smooth, easy-to-climb slope,” “Mountain with a flat top,” “Hill with evenly sloping slides\u201d\u2014all these seem fine to me. Even “Mountain that is lower than the other mountains around it” seems reasonable as an etymological justification for pirayama<\/i>. Pellard, however, apparently does not share this intuition. Fair enough. He investigates the Ryukyuan languages:<\/p>\n Turning to the Ryukyuan languages, the same meanings are attested for this etymon, and a PR form *pira<\/i> (a), and PJ *pira<\/i> 2.1\/2, can be reconstructed from the following forms: Yamatohama \u00e7i\u027ea<\/i> \u2018road over a mountain pass,\u2019 Kamikatetsu \u00e7\u00ec\u027e\u00e1<\/i> \u2018slope at the top of a mountain,\u2019 Yoron pja\u02d0<\/i>, Izena \u0278\u00ed\u027e\u00e1\u02d0<\/i>, Nakijin p\u02c0j\u00e1\u02d0<\/i>, Shuri \u0278\u00ed\u027e\u00e0<\/i>, Ishigaki ps\u0268s\u00e1<\/i> \u2018slope\u2019, Taketomi pi\u0255\u0259<\/i> \u2018slope (of a roof).\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Note that for none of these do we need hira<\/i> to mean anything other than “flat surface”\u2014as long as we don’t care about the angle of that surface relative to the ground<\/i>. (Also note that I was unable to recreate the Ishigaki orthography properly and others may be suspect too. Please refer to original paper.)<\/p>\n Anyway, long story short:<\/p>\n The relationship between \u2018hill, slope\u2019 and \u2018flat\u2019 is not obvious, but I propose that \u2018flat\u2019 is the original meaning of *pira<\/i> and that the sense \u2018hill, slope\u2019 is a secondary development through \u2018mountain pass, plateau\u2019.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I agree that “flat” is the original meaning of *pira<\/i>; as above, though, I don’t think you need to go through any mountain passes to get to “slope.” <\/p>\n Pellard then offers a connection to Ainu:<\/p>\n Interestingly, Ainu has a word pira<\/i> meaning \u2018cliff\u2019, and also a verb pirasa<\/i> \u2018to spread out.\u2019 The phonological and semantic match with Japonic *pira<\/i> is perfect and could hardly be a coincidence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n As noted above, I dispute \u201ccould hardly be a coincidence\u201d on anti-hubristic grounds. I\u2019m also deeply skeptical about the quality of the phonological match\u2014it looks good, but shouldn\u2019t we get a diachronic model of premodern Ainu involved, if we’re going to be comparing it to Old Japanese? But let’s put that aside and consider the semantic match.<\/p>\n First of all, it may be of interest to note that Ainu pira<\/i> seems to imply a specific kind of cliff. Tamura Suzuko\u2019s Ainu dictionary doesn\u2019t mention this, but, for example, Chiri Mashiho\u2019s Chimei Ainugo sh\u014djiten<\/cite> (Small Dictionary of Place-name Ainu) glosses the word as:<\/p>\n Cliff; a cliff where the soil has collapsed\/crumbled and the earth is revealed (Incidentally, Chiri also mentions the possible connection to Korean that Pellard brings up.)<\/p>\n Kayano Shigeru\u2019s Ainugo jiten<\/cite> (Ainu Dictionary) glosses it as:<\/p>\n Cliff: A cliff with neither trees nor grass growing on it It seems to me that the word pira<\/i> \u201ccliff\u201d is more likely to have an etymology referring to bareness or dirt than to flatness, mountain passes, etc. <\/p>\n In Yamada Sh\u016bz\u014d\u2019s Ainugo chimei no kenky\u016b<\/cite> (Study of Ainu place names), vol. 1, he says that place names including pira<\/i> \u201cremain widely distributed\u201d around Hokkaido. On p. 26 he also says:<\/p>\n Place names including pira<\/i> usually survive today with the kanji \u5e73 [NJ hira<\/i>, \u201cflat\u201d < OJ pira<\/i>] applied [to that element]. In Matsuura [Takeshir\u014d]\u2019s travel journals (nisshi<\/i>), it appears not only as a place name, but also in sentences like \u2018Here is a series of pira<\/i>\u2019 [kono tokoro pira<\/i>-tsuzuki nari<\/i>]. Going to the place in question, we find not a series of flat plains but a row of cliffs. From this it is clear that he used \u5e73 with the meaning of \u201ccliff.\u201d In ancient Japanese, \u5e73 hira<\/i> [= OJ pira<\/i>] means \u201csteep slope\u201d \u6025\u50be\u659c, and is still used in the dialects of the mountainous parts of northern T\u014dhoku [northeastern Japan]. Presumably Matsuura knew this well, and that was why he casually used \u5e73 to indicate a cliff.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I\u2019m not an expert on T\u014dhoku dialects, but a search through the Nihon h\u014dgen daijiten<\/cite> (Big dictionary of Japanese dialects) seems to support Yamada\u2019s contention. Hira<\/i> or an obvious variant appears as a dialect word for “low\/flat region” and\/or “slope” all over Japan, but as a word meaning “steep slope” only in Niigata, Iwate, Aomori, and Hokkaido (the northeast, basically). It’s also attested as a word for “cliff” in Iwate, Yamagata (northeast), and… Kagoshima, way down south. Okay, that’s a surprise\u2014but the general pattern is clearly that steep slope\/cliff meanings are clustered up north.<\/p>\n So what does all this mean? Well, to start from the obvious, it seems very likely that speakers of Japanese dialects borrowed the word pira<\/i> \u201ccliff\u201d from Ainu when they moved up north. (I severely doubt that the borrowing went the other way, as I am not aware of any other word for a basic geographical feature that the Ainu borrowed from Japanese and then used for lots of place names all over Hokkaido.) Note that at this point, the Japanese speakers would also already have had the word corresponding to modern hira<\/i>, and would have been using it for “flat place” and “even slope.” So they might have seen the new “cliff” meaning as an extension of that.<\/p>\n If pira<\/i> in OJ pirasaka<\/i> is related to Ainu pira<\/i> \u201ccliff,\u201d the mechanism would have to be either common ancestry or borrowing at a much earlier stage, from a hypothetical language related to Ainu but spoken in central\/western Japan. That second scenario doesn\u2019t sound impossible… but personally, I find \u201ccliff slope\u201d and \u201ccliff mountain\u201d rather less convincing as place names than \u201clevel\/smooth slope,\u201d \u201cflat-topped\/low\/smooth mountain,\u201d etc. Essentially, I don\u2019t see anything motivating<\/i> this scenario, and am inclined to stick to the null hypothesis: Japonic had pira<\/i> “flat,” which expanded to refer to level slopes and so on; Ainu had pira<\/i> “cliff”; they are a bit mixed up in the northeast due to A\u2192J borrowing but are not related in any meaningful way. (Oh, yeah, and a cosmic ray or something hit a certain dialect in Kagoshima and created an inconvenient mutation. If there are actually multiple examples like this west of Kyoto, I’d be interested to hear about it.)<\/p>\n Turning to the \u201cverb pirasa<\/i> \u2018to spread out\u2019\u201d… this English gloss is liable to cause misunderstandings, I think. The verb is transitive, so it doesn\u2019t mean “spread out like a plateau.\u201d It\u2019s more like \u201cspread out like a person spreads out toys on a rug.\u201d In Hattori Shir\u014d\u2019s Ainugo h\u014dgen jiten<\/cite> (Ainu Dialect Dictionary) it appears as every single dialect\u2019s translation for hirogeru\/spread it out<\/i>\u2014in the section about actions done to physical things\u2014and it appears as an element in several items under the heading chirakasu: to scatter, to put (a room) in disorder<\/i>.<\/p>\n In other words, the core meaning of pirasa<\/i> seems to be something like “cause things that were close together to not be that way any longer.” There\u2019s no Ainu-internal reason to suppose that it has anything to do with the word pira<\/i> cliff. It is used for “unroll a skin so that it lays\/hangs flat,” apparently, so I guess it\u2019s possible<\/i> that it\u2019s related to modern Japanese hira<\/i>, hirogeru<\/i>, etc… but unless someone can explain the -asa<\/i> part, again, I\u2019m sticking with the null hypothesis.<\/p>\n I know it\u2019s boring, but an overlooked phoneme here, a fudged definition there, and before long you’re committed to Japanese being Basque.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Following last week\u2019s opaque and diffuse system, here\u2019s another recent one from Thomas Pellard: \u201cA (more) comparative approach to some Japanese etymologies\u201d (PDF available from here). Great reading as always, especially for the mass of data from the southern branches of Japonic it supplies. My only objection is that the proposed etymological connections to Ainu … Continue reading “Pellard on etymology: Whence pira<\/i>?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5],"tags":[61,63,26,54,62],"class_list":["post-103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-papers","tag-ainu","tag-etymology","tag-japanese","tag-japonic","tag-ryukyuan"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9bLCp-1F","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/no-sword.jp\/zoku\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/no-sword.jp\/zoku\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/no-sword.jp\/zoku\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/no-sword.jp\/zoku\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/no-sword.jp\/zoku\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/no-sword.jp\/zoku\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":112,"href":"https:\/\/no-sword.jp\/zoku\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103\/revisions\/112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/no-sword.jp\/zoku\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/no-sword.jp\/zoku\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/no-sword.jp\/zoku\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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