Proto-Indo-European
*sem- "one, together with" became Sanskrit
saṃgha (combined with
*gʷʰen- "to strike"). Monier-Williams says this means "close contact or combination" and also "the whole community or collective body or brotherhood of monks". This word was borrowed into Middle Chinese, then into Japanese as
sō "monk", then was combined with
bon "ordinary" to form
bonsō, bonzō (凡僧) "unranked priest" (
bonsō also means "foolish monk" according to
WWWJDIC). This was borrowed into Portuguese as
bonzo, then into French, then into English as
bonze.
The above etymological madness is brought to you by the
AHD. As usual, the OED doesn't go this far; it just suggests that the Japanese word might be from Chinese
fă-sze "teacher of the law". (Has this anything to do with 法則 fǎzé "rule, law"?)
In the meantime,
*sem- became Russian
samo- "self", which combined with
varit' "to boil" (from
*wer- "to burn") to form самовар
samovar literally "self-boiler".
4 comments:
"Teacher" in modern Mandarin is translated as lǎoshī (see here), but lǎo (老) here literally means "old" and shī (师) originally meant "master" or "teacher" just by itself.
A fǎshī (法师) is apparently a "Buddhist master" (see here) but fǎzé (see here) refers to "law".
If you play the audio on the website, you'll here a distinct difference between how shī and zé are pronounced. The letter "i" is used here to represent a retroflex mid-high vowel (ie. sounds much like English "erh") while "e" represents an unrounded back vowel (ie. pronounce "o" without rounding the lips).
So is it possible that the OED's fă-sze "teacher of the law" is the same as your fǎshī, but in a different transliteration system?
Sze is an older transliteration equivalent to Hanyu Pinyin si, e.g. Szechuan=Sichuan. There does not seem to be a word "fasi" as far as I can find, so fǎshī (法师) is likely to be what was meant. Conflating the retroflex and sibiliant consonant series (s-sh, z-zh, ch-c) is common in Central and Southern China.
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