native Japanese word for 'womb'?
Alexander Vovin
Has anyone by any chance come across a native (non-Chinese)
(preferably pre-Kamakura) Japanese word for 'womb'? I am well aware of
the usages of hara 'belly' or shimo 'bottom' (predominantly in
Ryukyuan), or hie (presumably from 'millet') in mainland dialects.
What I really need is a *native* word that means just 'womb' as a part
of a mammal's body and not anything else that can be formed by a
comparison to a womb either by its shape or function, as a
periphrastic formation. Thank you,
Sasha
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Alexander Vovin
Visiting Professor, International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto &
Professor of East Asian Languages
University of Hawaii at Manoa
Yasuhiro Kondo
kotsubo 'child jar'
NippoJisho (Japanese Portuguese Dictionary 1603) etc.
or
kobukuro 'child bag'
Byouron-zokugen-kai (1639) etc.
And, the sasimi of pig's raw "KOBUKURO" is a Japanese favorite dish at
Yakitori bar in Tokyo. :-)
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Yasuhiro Kondo
Aoyama Gakuin University
Alexander Vovin wrote;
lema...@gmail.com
Does "ena" written with the characters 胞衣 count? This would be
rendered as "placenta" in English.
Lawrence
Alexander Vovin
Many thanks to Yasuhiro Kondo and Lawrence Marceau for
responding to my query about native pre-modern Japanese word for
'womb'.
kotsubo and kobukuro are, unfortunately periphrastic constructions
that are also attested in dialects. I am also aware of ena 'placenta'
(although it might be also yena or wena originally -- the word is
attested for the first time in 伊呂波時類抄 from 1180, as far as I can tell,
and in spite of still surviving man'yoogana spellings with 衣 that
should indicate e- and not ye- or we-, 1180 is way too late for these
distinctions to survive). But 'placenta' is not quite the 'womb'.
As far as I can tell, the native word for 'womb' does not
appear in the earliest Heian dictionaries -- Shinsenjikyoo and
Wamyooshoo, although the former ironically enough provides Chinese 胎
with a fanqie reading and other non-relevant in this case information.
In sum, this is a strange mystery. Ancient Japanese certainly
must have been aware of the existence of this anatomical organ.
Best wishes,
Sasha
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Alexander Vovin
Visiting Professor, International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto &
Professor of East Asian Languages
University of Hawaii at Manoa
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Richard Bowring
Can I ask (out of ignorance) why the mystery? Why are you so
concerned to try and find a word that is not either descriptive or
periphrastic? It is the rule that words that refer to parts of the
body are neither descriptive nor periphrastic? A quick look at the
word 'womb' in the OED suggests otherwise, namely that it too is
descriptive.
Richard Bowring
Cambridge, UK
On 12 May 2008, at 13:05, Alexander Vovin wrote:
>
> Dear all,
>
Alexander Vovin
Many thanks for your question because it completely changed my way
of thinking about this problem and made me to look at it from a
different angle. I think that thanks to you I now know the solution to
this problem, which I relate below.
To answer your question partially first, the thing is that
although words for body parts in any language can be borrowed,
replaced, tabooed, alter the meaning, be preserved only in compounds
etc. (e.g. J atama originally meant 'fontanel', not 'head', French
te^te 'head' is from Lat. testa 'pot' that replaced the original Latin
word for 'head', Russian glaz 'eye' (originally small shining stone)
replaced old oko (which is of Indo-European origin, etc., etc.). But
at the same time *in many cases* body part terms tend to be neither
descriptive nor periphrastic, but primary, so that is why they are
valued so much by historical linguists. Just looking at the Old
Japanese names for main internal organs, there is nothing descriptive
or perihrastic about ki1mo1 'liver', ko2ko2ro2 'heart', and wata
'interstines'. Well, pukupukusi 'lungs' may be either
descriptive/onomatopoetic, or an early loan from Korean. So this is, I
trust, is the usual way of thinking for a historical linguist, and
this is why I was frantically searching for a primary word for 'womb'.
Also given the fact that both Chinese and proto-Indo-European have
primary words for 'womb' (although Chinese is debatable) it also
seemed odd that there is no such word in Japonic.
It is your reference to OED that put things in order. I
immediately started to think about such cases as Greek gasteer, Latin
ventris, etc. that are like English womb etymologically connected to
'belly', 'stomach'. There seem to be two other tendencies to form the
word for 'womb' -- one deriving it from 'child', like modern Japanese
shikyuu (or the forms that Yasuhiro Kondo mentioned), apparently
back-borrowed by both modern Chinese and Korean as zigong and cakwung
respectively, and the other from 'mother', like Russian mat-ka.
Finally, Old Chinese 胞 may mean both 'uterus' and 'placenta', so MJ
ena 'placenta' mentioned by Lawrence may be not so divorced
semantically as I originally thought.
So I see two solutions now: most likely Japonic word for 'womb'
was simply the same as the 'belly': para, supported by OJ para-N-kara
'sublings from the same womb' (cf. Greek adelphos with the same
meaning). Or it could be the same word as ena 'placenta.'
Again, my sincere thanks to everyone who responded. I think the
problem is solved now.
Best wishes,
Sasha
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Alexander Vovin
Visiting Professor, International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto &
Professor of East Asian Languages
University of Hawaii at Manoa
2008/5/12 Richard Bowring <rb...@cam.ac.uk>:
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