Re: Tempting parallels

Zhen Lin Low wrote:
> No... not ヘン-辺, へ-辺, also spelt 方. I suppose, the link
> between 辺 and 部 is not very far-fetched.
>
> If, 家 is decomposed into i-pe... then where does the i come from?
> Some corrupted form of wi[ru]?

That wouldn't be likely. Back in 1962(?) I suggested a lost verb "y-" =
"sleep" whence *"y-i-pe" = "sleeping quarters," *"y-u-ka" = "place to
sleep," *"y-i" = "sleep" of いをぬ (寝を寝) = "sleep a sleep," *"y-u-me"
= "sleeping eye," as well as *"y-a" = "house" (turned into "sleeper"),
that might be related to Korean "ca-" = "sleep." (Cf. K. "cip" =
"house," but I don't know what the "-ip" would be.) To my surprise,
this idea never got me rich and famous.

> Back to the original topic... Lexical similarities are somewhat...
> boring, perhaps. I'm more interested in finding interesting
> morphological or grammatical [though not syntactic... there are so many
> to be drawn there] similarities.

One possibility in the morphological realm might be the apparent
syllable that turned transitive verbs intransitive, and vice-versa, in
Japanese. We see the vestiges of this when we look at verb pairs in the
"...-u/...-e-ru" pattern (付く／付ける; 焼く／焼ける) with otsurui
syllables in the appropriate OJ forms which are widely believed to come
from a merger of "a-i." (There must have been a consonant before the
"i" originally, because early Japanese didn't take to vowel sequences.)

This *might* relate to Korean verb pairs which have causative (vs. v.i.)
or passive (vs. v.t.) members with "...hi-" or "...<reinforced
consonant>i-" and the like.

Bart
.

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