I noticed that both 死ぬ and the 音読み of 死 share a し sound. Is this a huge coincidence between Japanese and Chinese, or is there some sort of relation? I guess the former, because I don't know any function ぬ may have after a borrowed noun, but I don't know much about etymology.
1 Answer
It is a tempting identification, but the 〜ぬ suffix is inexplicable. In fact, there are only two n-stem verbs in Old Japanese – 死ぬ and 去【い】ぬ – plus one auxiliary (the perfective 〜ぬ), all of which are conjecturally related. Linguistic coincidences are not unheard of: one well-known example concerns the word "dog" in English and in Mbabaram.
For what it's worth, the 日本語国語大辞典 records the following etymological theories:
【語源説】
(1)息がなくなる意のシイヌ（息去）の義〔日本語原学＝林甕臣〕。シイヌル（息逝）の義〔松屋棟梁集〕。
(2)サリヌルの反〔名語記〕。
(3)スギイヌル（過往）の義〔名言通〕。
(4)シヲルル、シボム、シヒルの義と通じる〔国語の語根とその分類＝大島正健〕。
(5)シは〆領る、ヌは歇了る義〔国語本義〕。
By contrast, it is generally accepted that words like 馬【うま】 and 梅【うめ】 are ancient loanwords from Chinese.
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Re: 馬{うま}, while likely arriving in Japanese via Chinese, that word probably originated in some central Asian language, given the proliferation of related terms throughout many otherwise-unrelated languages. See also 馬#Japanese on Wiktionary and mark (Proto-Indo-European) on Wiktionary. May 19, 2014 at 17:28
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Re: Japanese and Chinese 死, I also recall somewhere running into the theory that this might well have been some such linguistic accident, where a native proto-Japanese word for "death" just happened to sound like the Chinese word, hence the し overlap in both on'yomi and kun'yomi. (That said, at the moment I can't remember which resource I found that in.) May 19, 2014 at 17:32