Primary Sources

Posted by languagehat

https://languagehat.com/shamisen/

https://languagehat.com/?p=20026

In my ongoing Kurosawa retrospective, I’ve reached 1954 and Seven Samurai, which I’ve seen more often than any other of his (it’s one of my favorite movies, and of course whenever I read DeWitt’s great novel I have to rewatch it). I’ve been following along with the excellent commentaries (two different tracks, one with five film scholars!) on the Criterion set, and at one point there’s a reference to the “shamisen player.” I’ve run across that form before, but I think of the instrument as a samisen, and I finally got irritated enough to investigate. My memory that it used to be known as samisen turns out to be correct; the OED (entry from 1909) has only that form even in Japanese (“Etymon: Japanese samisen”), and Webster’s Third (1961) uses the headword samisen, adding “also samsien […] or shamisen.” (I was unaware of the form samsien, and Google Books finds only 19th-century uses.) But here in the 21st century, Wikipedia has it under Shamisen, starting the article “The shamisen or samisen (三味線), also known as sangen (三絃) (all meaning ‘three strings’), is a three-stringed traditional Japanese musical instrument derived from the Chinese instrument sanxian,” and AHD has “sham·i·sen (shăm′ĭ-sĕn′) also sam·i·sen (săm′-).” So why the difference?

Wiktionary has an interesting and complex etymology:

The instrument derives from the Okinawan 三線 (sanshin). Originally called 蛇皮線 (jabisen, literally “snakeskin strings”) in Japanese, so named for the way the Okinawan instrument’s soundbox is traditionally covered in snakeskin. The traditional jabisen instrument was imported into the Sakai area of Osaka during the Eiroku era (1558–1570), then later modified by biwa luthiers to have the square-shaped shamisen soundbox of today.

The reading jabisen shifted over time to 蛇味線 (jamisen), replacing the 皮 (bi, “skin, leather”) character with 味 (mi) for phonetic reasons, i.e. as ateji (当て字). Then jamisen changed to shamisen, replacing the 蛇 (ja, “snake”) character with 三 (sha, usually read san, “three”) for semantic reasons. The sha reading for the 三 character is irregular.

The shamisen reading is first cited to a text from 1580.

AHD derives it straightforwardly from san ‘three’ + mi ‘taste, touch’ + sen ‘string’; the references for the Okinawan etymology are in Japanese, so I can’t evaluate them. Thoughts?

Incidentally, the etymology of samurai itself is more complex than I would have expected; Wiktionary:

⟨sa morapi1⟩ → /saburapi/ → /saburafi/ → /samurawi/ → /samurai/

Sound shift from saburai (see below), itself the 連用形 (ren’yōkei, stem or continuative form) of classical verb 侍ふ (saburafu, “to serve”, modern saburau).

The shift from saburaf- → samuraf- is due to the development of the 女性語 (josei-go, “women’s language”) in Middle Japanese. A different development of this b is seen in 候 (sōrō, “service”, classical saurafu).

The usage note is also worth a read:

In modern popular usage, the terms bushi and samurai are often used in both English and Japanese somewhat loosely to refer to any soldier or warrior during Japan’s feudal age (prior to the Meiji period). In historical contexts, these terms may be used with more specific senses, wherein bushi refers to any professional warrior, and samurai refers more strictly to a hereditary social class. See also Samurai on Wikipedia.

https://languagehat.com/shamisen/

https://languagehat.com/?p=20026