Japanese's Ancient Connection to English

[griffinpdb]

Would you believe me if I told you Japanese 蜜（みつ）and English ‘Mead’ were… related???

Well, they are. Thanks to our much-neglected friend Tocharian (not really ancient though, sorry for the clickbait).

First, I should say something that surprises most non-linguists (idk how it’s not common knowledge by now): the Germanic (including English), Romance, Greek, Slavic, Gaelic and even North Indian languages are decendants of one language: Proto-Indo European (aka PIE). These branches came to be through migration and loss of contact with one another, but originally, it was one group of people speaking one language. So perhaps you’re already surprised that English and Hindi are distant cousins.

I’ll take you to what’s relevant to this post, though! One branch of the Indo-European family, mistakenly called Tocharian (but we’ll call it that anyway) was situated as far East as Western China, and was a part of the Silk Road. When languages touch (like Tocharian and Chinese), they borrow words from one another. One of these touchy words originally came from PIE’s

*médʰu (“honey; mead”) → Tocharian ‘mit’ → Old Chinese 蜜 ‘mit / mjit’ (reconstructed) → Middle Chinese ‘mjit’ (reconstructed) → Japanese 蜜 ‘mitsu’

As you can imagine, this is also where English gets its word ‘mead’.

Here’s a link to all attested Tocharian words in Japanese (there’s not many): https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Japanese_terms_derived_from_Tocharian_languages

Also, since the Proto-Indo-Europeans were animal domesticators compared to China’s agriculturalists, it’s also believed (by some, not widely accepted) that the root that gives us English ‘chariot’ gave Japan, through Chinese, what would become the onyomi 車 (しゃ). Crazy right?

[CatDQ]

Thanks for sharing this. I always find stuff like this fascinating, and it gives a deeper insight into how languages work which sometimes helps me better understanding of why certain word groups conjugate a certain way or have similar sounds associated with them

[roserose]

I delve into classical Chinese quite a bit, and inputs into that from Sanskrit, etc…

It is so weird to find roots that survive into English, from Latin or some other, from further east languages.

For instance, there is a Buddha called Amida. In Japanese, it is usually written as three purely phonetic characters that pre-date kana ( 阿弥陀 ). a-mi-da is not-limited-light or not-measured-light. In English, we still use sometimes the “a” to be not. (asexual, agnostic, amoral). We use “mi” for measure (meter). I don’t think that we use the “da” for light.

Anyways, from what I understand, the history of these words traces together, and is not just coincidence of sounds. I could list dozens of times when I have found such, and I am always amazed.

[Hairymini]

Lovely read and great post. Personally I have a penchant for the little known and obscure connection between the languages that is バター and “butter” but I don’t really have the fully etymology down yet.