katana (was: Another Portuguese (?) question)

It seems that there is an Altaic etymology for _katana_ --
provided of course that you accept (a) the Altaic grouping
(which I tend to do) and (b) the connexion of Japanese with
Altaic (on which I'm not enough informed).

See <http://tinyurl.com/to6rq>

(The actual URL is very long, with a lot of parameters, but
the tinyurl worked when I tried it.)

I guess your plan D should be to find out how, from where
and with what intermediaries the art of sword-making has
spread in East Asia. Might there have been contact between
eastern Indonesia and Japan/Korea prior to the Portuguese? I
read that iron was rare in Japan, so perhaps they imported
metal from Indonesia, or more likely both Indonesia and
Japan imported iron from China?

(Note: I'm well aware of the pros and cons of the Altaic
hypothesis, so I think we should all agree at once to
disagree, since we are unlikely to sway eachother. FYI my
personal opinion is that if you go back long enough the
distinction between a single ancestral language and a
convergence area becomes useless. That's basically my stance
on Nostratic as well.)

Roger Mills skrev:
> Re "katana" et al.
>
> Thanks to all for your replies, helpful in a
> negative way ;-)
>
> Plan C: perhaps the Port/Span. borrowed (native) Jap.
> katana, then transplanted it to eastern Indonesia.
> However, it is odd that the word is not found in my Malay
> or Indonesian dictionaries (quite exhaustive)-- as almost
> all Port/Span. loans were spread via Malay. But it's not
> impossible-- they hit up the Moluccas for the spices
> before they got around to messing with the rest of
> Indies....
>
> Plan X, accidental resemblance, is simply too far out in
> left field; you just don't get a match of 6 phonemes +
> semantics.
>
> As usual, "more research is needed".
>
>
>

--


/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se

    a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot

                                 (Max Weinreich)


--


/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se

    a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot

                                 (Max Weinreich)