Japanese Language Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for students, teachers, and linguists wanting to discuss the finer points of the Japanese language. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I read once somewhere that the word 'sake' (酒, Japanese rice wine) comes from sha-ke (鮭, salmon). Can someone explain what this connection is?
Any thoughts on why most Japanese people * don't know the origin of the word sake are also appreciated.
*Most Japanese people who I know ... @Tsuyoshi Ito may know more.
What is the connection? None, apparently.
According to 語源由来辞典 (always a good place to check on that sort of question), none of the likely etymologies have anything to do with "sha-ke" or fish in general.
The above site mentions a couple of theories for the etymology of the word "さけ", including:
but goes on to state that the most plausible etymology is the following: さ is a prefix (of unspecified meaning) attached to き, an older word for sake. The final vowel assumedly changed somewhere along the way.
Let me say a word about the secondary part of the question:
Any thoughts on why most Japanese people * don't know the origin of the word sake are also appreciated.
A simple answer is because understanding the etymology requires study and research and most Japanese people are not linguists. Ask an average English speaker what the etymological connection is between, say, meal and meat, and I would not expect that you will get any answer beyond a guess. Being fluent in a language does not mean that one knows the etymology.
But there is something more on this. I heard that even when you ask linguists, it is often more difficult to trace the origin of a word in Japanese than in English. This is because the origin of the Japanese language itself is unclear (see Japonic languages and the classification of Japonic). If you think about the etymological study as a kind of detective work, there is often not much clue on which a theory about the origin of a word can be built. On the other hand, there are many languages which have common origins with English, and it is often possible to get some clue by comparing them.
One of several explanations for the origin of the word 鮭 is that the colour of the salmon's flesh is that of a "drunk red", and that subsequently the word "sake" derived from either "sakake" (酒気, tipsiness) or "ake" (朱 scarlet, red).
The fact that this is in no way verified must help explain why most Japanese you encountered had no idea about it… (and also, the derivation of the name is in the opposite direction of that which you implied.)
[citation needed]on this. There are a ton of homophones or near-homophones in Japanese which are not necessarily related. Not saying they aren't, but it seems awfully obscure. :)