Re: Trivia: Tsumetai

Dave Fossett wrote:
> A bit late, but this week's "Trivia no Izumi" on Fuji TV featured an
> interesting piece of language trivia. Apparently, "冷たい" is derived
> from "爪が痛い", the sensation one supposedly feels when touching
> something cold.

That's one that never occurred to me, although one can expect a compound
of some kind when one sees a "e" in pure Japanese.

爪痛い would be more accurate than 爪が痛い, as the word came into being
long before が came to be a sort of nominative case marker. Then the
question is, was 爪 つめ or つま at the time of contraction.

Bart
.

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