Latest comment: 18 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
This seemed really encyclopedic and not very useful but still of interest. I'm not sure what to do with it:
The Kun reading /uma/ may be used alone as a word for horse or as part of another word. The On reading is usually part of a word, for example 乗馬 (じょうば /zyooba/ "horseback riding") or 駟馬 (しめ /sime/ or しば /siba/ "a set of four horses for drawing a carriage"). /ma-/ is not an On reading and is rather a bound morpheme attested since the Old Japanese period. It has not appeared alone as a free word since the earliest Japanese anthology, the Manyoshu, but it still lingers on in Modern Japanese in such forms as /ma-gusa/ (hay; fodder for horses or cattle) and /ma-guso/ (horse droppings). As for the etymological relationship between the Japanese Kun readings, the form /uma/ has probably evolved from an older form /mima/, which is actually attested in compounds and names of Emperors in Old Japanese and still appears in toponyms (placenames) even today. /mima/ itself was probably a compound of the Old Japanese honorific prefix /mi-/, which had the same function as Modern Japanese /o-/, and the original Japanese root for "horse," i.e. */ma/. In the same manner as */mi-ma/ became fossilized as /mima/ and later eroded into /muma/ or /uma/, the Chinese loanword /tya/ (tea) has been prefixed with the more recent Japanese honorific prefix /o-/ and become fixed as /o-tya/(pronounced "ocha") no matter whether a speaker really wants to indicate respect toward the tea or its provider. No one says just /tya/ ("cha") in Modern Japanese, just as no one says just /ma-/; one has to say "uma."
Latest comment: 18 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
The new "Han character" template, with its two columns, is just not working in this case. It's confusing and the right column is very thin whereas the left column is huge. Badagnani22:32, 24 October 2006 (UTC)Reply
That's the very long (and not properly formatted) link, combined with a window size comparatively too small. The link needs to be fixed ... will do. There's lots of junky things in some of these entries. Robert Ullmann22:42, 24 October 2006 (UTC)Reply
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