Talk:떡

Etymology

@Tibidibi, do you have any references for your mention of Japanese 粢 (shitogi)? I'd love to build out the JA entry, but I'm hesitant to say flatly that this "is an ancient Koreanic borrowing into Japanese" without either a source to back it up, or adding a qualifier like "might be". ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 18:24, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

Martin says (in Consonant Lenition in Korean and the Macro-Altaic Question, p. 45) that "the noun *stek 'rice cake' must have had two syllables... *sutek, from which J sitogi seems to be an eleventh-century borrowing".

Frellesvig also says (in A History of the Japanese Language, p. 147) that "the following words have been thought to have been borrowed from a Korean language. Usually we do not know which, but must simply assume an earlier cognate form of an attested Middle Korean word as the source... sitogi (EMJ) 'rice cake for ceremonial purposes', MK stek 'rice cake'".

On a cursory search, I find no source claiming an Ainu provenance for this word and these two important ones outright stating a Korean donor.--Tibidibi (talk) 22:59, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

@Tibidibi: The KDJ entry cites the Japanese term to a source dated roughly 898–901, pointing to a borrowing at least a little earlier than the 10th century. The surface form of the Japanese term would suggest that this is the 連用形 (ren'yōkei, “continuative or stem form”) of verb sitogu, but no such verb appears in the historic record, from what I can tell. Nor does sitogi decompose into any likely compound components. The odd morphology does seem to point towards a borrowing.

Given the limited time depth for Ainu sources, and the apparent lack of any plausible mechanism for Ainu sito to produce Japanese sitogi, it seems more likely that the Ainu term was borrowed from Japanese, with the final -gi falling out perhaps due to the influence of homophone sito ("clot") -- even more likely, I think, if congealed blood were a food item in Ainu culture, although I have no knowledge of that at all. I note too that the Japanese term may have either flat pitch accent, or with an accent on the second mora -- the resulting "weaker" sound of the final -gi in Japanese may have also played a role in its disappearance from the Ainu term.

Agreed that the path of borrowing was probably Koreanic pre-historic form of stek → Early Middle Japanese → Ainu.

Thank you for adding the references to the Korean entry here. When I get to working on the shitogi entry (not today, due to other responsibilities IRL), I'll copy those over as appropriate. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 00:20, 1 December 2021 (UTC)

Also, @荒巻モロゾフ, Batchelor's Ainu dictionary includes an entry Shito here on page 422, glossing this as both "Cakes made of millet" and as "A clot. Congealed blood." This suggests a possibility that the older meaning may have been "congealed blood", leading to "congealed blood used as food" (c.f. black pudding), then "lumpen thing used as food", then "cakes made of millet".

FWIW, I see this same term listed in the intermediate-level Ainu materials for the Chitose dialect, on page 92 of the PDF here.

Alternatively, there might have been a native Ainu term sito ("congealed blood; clot") and a borrowed Japanese term sito ("cakes made of millet") that just happened to share the same phonology.

I appreciate your addition of the qualifier "might".