Hi
The crux of this is in the terms used. “Raca”, which is a contemptuous term often translated as “fool” or “idiot”, stems from an animal - in contemporary Japanese which has its origins in Hebrew, the term is Baka: ba is horse or donkey.
As someone who speaks Japanese and as someone who likes to study languages, I’d like to address this. First, no, unlike some people on the internet might claim, the Japanese language has no relation to Hebew.
Second, about the insult
baka: the thing is,
baka originally did not strictly have the nuance of ‘stupid’, ‘idiot(ic)’ or ‘dumb’ that it has today. The original Japanese word for ‘foolish’, ‘idiotic’ or ‘stupid’ is, in fact,
oroka- (愚か, おろか).
The very first appearance of
baka in Japanese literature (as 馬鹿者
baka-no-mono) is in the
Taiheiki, written around the late 14th century. Back then,
baka - as the late 15th century dictionary
Setsuyōshū (文明本節用集, ca. 1474) defined it - meant something along the lines of (as an adjective) ‘violent’ or ‘rowdy’ synonymous to the word 狼藉
rōzeki (lit. ‘wolf’s grass bed’).
馬鹿(バカ) 或作母嫁馬嫁破家共 狼籍之義也
馬鹿: Also written as 母嫁, 馬嫁, (or) 破家. Means ‘in a mess’/‘disorder’/‘confusion’/‘disorderly’/‘rowdy’/‘violent’ (狼籍).
- 母嫁: 母 ‘mother’ + 嫁 ‘to marry, bride’; 馬嫁: 馬 ‘horse’ + 嫁 ‘bride’; 破家: 破 ‘to destroy’ + 家 ‘house, family’.
Baka only definitively acquired the meaning ‘idiot’ fairly recently in history, around the Edo period; one of the first literary attestation of this is in the novel
Kōshoku Ichidai Otoko (好色一代男 ‘The Life of an Amorous Man’, written 1682).
Now, no one today exactly knows the origins of the word
baka, and there are actually a number of theories:
(1) The oldest theory is that
baka, written as 馬鹿 (deer-horse), is a reference to an anecdote found in the
Records of the Grand Historian concerning the Qin Dynasty traitor Zhao Gao (d. 207 BC):
Zhao Gao was contemplating treason but was afraid the other officials would not heed his commands, so he decided to test them first.
He brought a deer and presented it to the Second Emperor but called it a horse. The Second Emperor laughed and said, “Is the chancellor perhaps mistaken,
calling a deer a horse?” Then the emperor questioned those around him. Some remained silent, while some, hoping to ingratiate themselves with Zhao Gao, said it was a horse, and others said it was a deer. Zhao Gao secretly arranged for all those who said it was a deer to be brought before the law. Thereafter the officials were all terrified of Zhao Gao.
This anecdote gave rise to the Chinese (and Japanese) idiom “calling a deer a horse” (i.e. deliberate misrepresentation for ulterior purposes). A 1548 dictionary (
Unbo irohashu, 運歩色葉集) in fact gives this etymology for
baka: 指鹿曰馬 (“pointing at a deer and saying [it is a] horse”). At first glance, this etymology might seem close to
baka’s original meaning of ‘confusion’ or ‘disorder’. The weakness of this theory, however, is that
baka is not a pure
on’yomi reading, which one might expect if this was a word of Chinese origin.
- To explain, Chinese characters or kanji in Japanese usually have two or more pronunciations, which can generally be classified as being either on’yomi or kun’yomi. On’yomi refers to the modern descendant of the Japanese approximation of the Chinese pronunciation of the character at the time it was introduced; kun’yomi meanwhile is a reading based on the pronunciation of a native Japanese word that closely approximated the meaning of the Chinese character. Take for example the character 東 ‘east’: in on’yomi it is read as tō (とう), the Japanese approximation of Middle Chinese *tung (cf. modern Mandarin dong1 or Cantonese dung1). Meanwhile, the native Japanese words for ‘east’, himukasi/hi
gasi (modern higashi) and aduma (modern azuma), were also applied to the character - these are 東’s kun’yomi. To give a concrete example: the 東 in Tokyo (東京 Tōkyō) is on’yomi, while the 東 in Higashi-Nihon (東日本, ‘East Japan’) is kun’yomi.
Sometimes, there are
kanji compounds that use
and on’yomi**kun’yomi, the Japanese version of hybrid words. 馬鹿 is such a case: it is a combination of
ba (one possible
on’yomi for 馬) and
ka (a
kun’yomi for 鹿, the native word for ‘deer’; cf.
shika). If the word was read using only
on’yomi, 馬鹿 would have been something like
ba-roku.
