Etymology #2: Mirar and Miru?

For those of you who've studied or speak both Spanish and Japanese, one word will strike you as particularly interesting: the verb for 'look', 'see' or 'watch', which translate into mirar in Spanish and 見る miru in Japanese. With the resemblance of the first three letters in the stems, mir-, I couldn't help but wonder whether there may have been a shared history(!) and began researching it.

Mirar derives from the deponent Latin verb miror, mirari, miratus sum, a verb meaning "be astonished/amazed at, marvel at, admire". This has left traces in most descendant languages: Catalan, Occitan and Portuguese mirar; Italian and Sardinian mirare (Sardinian also has mirai); Romanian mira; and French mirer. In Spanish, the stem has extended to give forms like milagro (miracle), admirar (to admire) and all its derivatives. In fact, you will notice that the English words resemble their Spanish equivalents, precisely because they also derive from the same root; for example, miracle and milagro both trace their roots back to the Latin miraculum (< Vulgar Latin *mirare < Classical Latin miror, et al.), with the greatest difference being that Spanish changed the c to g and it metathesized (switched places) with l (I will discuss this in another post, but this isn't an unusual process in languages: Spanish has done so with words like peligro or palabra; English, with horse and wasp; and Japanese, with 新しい atarashii). English has additionally derived the word mirror from this root as well! The Spanish espejo (= mirror) claims its roots in speculum instead.

"That's all well and good," you say. "But what about the Japanese verb 見る miru?" For those of you who are familiar with the composition of kanji, one of the many scripts used to write Japanese, you will notice that Japanese uses a kanji composed of 目 'eye' on top and 人 'person' on bottom. This kanji actually provides a clue as to the origin of the verb 見る miru. 目 is read me (think 'meh' and not 'me' as in "me myself") from the even older reading ma (which gave life to other words like 眼, manako < 目な子 and 前 mae < 目辺 mahe/maye(?)), which is believed to be the stem of this verb. In fact, this verb also gave life to the future tense in Old Japanese. In Modern Japanese, the future tense is expressed by using the dictionary form of the verb, or--in more formal situations--by attaching -masu to the conjunctive form of the verb; thus, to express "I will speak" in Japanese, modern Japanese use either 話す hanasu or, in contexts calling for more politeness, 話します hanashimasu (= conjunctive stem 話し hanashi- plus ます -masu). Speakers of Old Japanese, on the other hand, resorted to a different method: they suffixed む -mu to the end of the negative stem of the verb--in this case, 話さ hanasa- (Modern Japanese usage would allow the suffixes ない -nai to give 'do not speak' or 'will not speak', れる -reru for 'is/will be spoken (about)', せる -seru for '[will] make ~ speak' or '[will] force ~ to speak', and せられる -serareru for 'is/will be made to speak (about)') to give 話さむ hanasamu. The forces of erosion gradually wore the word down (話さむ hanasamu -->　話さん hanasan -->　話さう hanasau -->　話そう hanasou) to give the conjunctive form of the verb, used in Modern Japanese to express the ideas "let's speak", "shall we speak?" (話そうか？ hanasou ka?), "I shall speak", and "I'm thinking I will speak" (話そうと思っています hanasou to omotte imasu).

Unfortunately (fortunately?), my research did not prove any relation between the forms; rather, they just showed how these forms can coincidentally develop, much in the same way that the aboriginal Australian language Mbabaram developed dog with the same meaning as the English dog with no English language contact (comparisons with other aboriginal languages showed forms like gudaga, guda, gurraa and gudaa). Future research and discoveries could prove otherwise, however!

Sources

1. El Almanaque
2. Wiktionary
3. Mbabaram language - Wikipedia
4. Takuya Okimori 沖森卓也, 初めて読む日本語の歴史 (Hajimete yomu nihongo no rekishi) (available for purchase at Amazon Japan)