{"id":40954,"date":"2018-12-11T15:12:59","date_gmt":"2018-12-11T20:12:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=40954"},"modified":"2018-12-11T15:12:59","modified_gmt":"2018-12-11T20:12:59","slug":"sino-sanskritic-devil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=40954","title":{"rendered":"Sino-Sanskritic \"devil\""},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the most curious and fascinating words I learned during the first or second year of Mandarin study was m\u00f3gu\u01d0 \u9b54\u9b3c (\"devil; demon; fiend\").\u00a0 Somehow it just sounded right as the designation for what it signified:<\/p>\n

T\u0101 sh\u00ecg\u00e8 m\u00f3gu\u01d0 \u4ed6\u662f\u500b\u9b54\u9b3c (\"He's a devil\")<\/p>\n

Even the characters, which I have always deemphasized since I began learning Mandarin, seemed appropriate. Gu\u01d0 \u9b3c (\"ghost; spirit; apparition; deuce\"), the representation of a bogeyman that goes all the way back to the oracle bone inscriptions more than three millennia ago, was the thing itself.\u00a0 Although I didn't know the exact meaning of m\u00f3 \u9b54, it too had the gu\u01d0 \u9b3c radical, so I thought of m\u00f3gu\u01d0 \u9b54\u9b3c as a \"m\u00f3 \u9b54 type gu\u01d0 \u9b3c\", and I just took it on faith that it meant \"devil\".<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It was only after I started studying the transmission of Buddhism to China that I became acquainted with the Sanskrit word \u092e\u093e\u0930 m\u0101ra (\u201ckilling; death; Destroyer; demon; Evil One\u201d) and its transcription in Sinographs as m\u00f3lu\u00f3 \u9b54\u7f85 (Middle Sinitic mu\u0251l\u0251).<\/p>\n

So that's where whoever dreamed up the word m\u00f3gu\u01d0 \u9b54\u9b3c (\"devil; demon; fiend\") got the first syllable, from Sanskrit.\u00a0 They had to invent a new character to represent that syllable, which they handily did by taking the long established graph m\u00e1 \u9ebb (\"hemp; cannabis; flax\"), which goes back to the bronze inscriptions nearly three thousand years ago for the sound and joining to it gu\u01d0 \u9b3c (\"devil; demon; fiend\") for the meaning.<\/p>\n

In the course of preparing this post, I came to know of the ryakuji \u7565\u5b57<\/span><\/a> (extreme, unofficial simplified kanji [Sinograph]) form of \u9ebb in Japanese, which consists of the radical \u5e7f + the katakana \u30de as phonetic \u201cma\u201d for the on<\/i> [Sinitic] reading).<\/p>\n

The m\u00f3 \u9b54 syllable was adopted into Korean as well where we find such words as \"maryeok \/ malyeog \ub9c8\ub825 \/ \u9b54\u529b\" (\"witchcraft; witchery; spell; charm\") and \"mabeob \ub9c8\ubc95 \/ \u9b54\u6cd5\" (\"[black] magic; enchantment; sorcery; wizardry\").<\/p>\n

Modern Sinitic (and by extension other East Asian languages) are full of Sanskrit loanwords, such as the following:<\/p>\n

ch\u00e0n\u00e0 \u524e\u90a3 (\"instant\" < k\u1e63a\u1e47a)<\/p>\n

ch\u00e1n(n\u00e0) \u79aa(\u90a3) (\"meditation; Zen\" < dhy\u0101na)<\/span>\"<\/p>\n

p\u00fas\u00e0 \u83e9\u85a9 <\/i>(\"Bodhisattva<\/a>\" < p\u00fat\u00eds\u00e0du\u01d2 \u83e9\u63d0\u85a9\u57f5 [shortened by taking only the first and third syllables])<\/p>\n

f\u0101ngbi\u00e0n \u65b9\u4fbf (\"convenience\" < upaya), with which regular readers of Language Log are thoroughly familiar<\/p>\n

Most borrowings from Sanskrit into Chinese are sound transcriptions (the first three above), but some are translations (the fourth one above).\u00a0 M\u00f3gu\u01d0 \u9b54\u9b3c (\"devil; demon; fiend\") is interesting in that it is half transcription and half translation, though it started out as full transcription, viz., m\u00f3lu\u00f3 \u9b54\u7f85 (\u201ckilling; death; Destroyer; demon; Evil One\u201d).\u00a0 It's similar to the far more recent borrowing of English \"ice cream\" as b\u012bngq\u00edl\u00edn \u51b0\u6dc7\u6dcb.<\/span><\/p>\n

[h.t. Kendra Dale]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the most curious and fascinating words I learned during the first or second year of Mandarin study was m\u00f3gu\u01d0 \u9b54\u9b3c (\"devil; demon; fiend\").\u00a0 Somehow it just sounded right as the designation for what it signified: T\u0101 sh\u00ecg\u00e8 m\u00f3gu\u01d0 \u4ed6\u662f\u500b\u9b54\u9b3c (\"He's a devil\") Even the characters, which I have always deemphasized since I began […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194,189,205],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-borrowing","category-transcription","category-translation"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40954"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40954\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40974,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40954\/revisions\/40974"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}