秋刀魚

秋刀魚

1. Pacific saury (Cololabis saira)

Uncertain, theories include:

• An alteration from earlier compound 狭 (sa, “narrow”, in reference to the slender body of the fish) + 真魚 (mana, “edible fish”):

  /samana/ → /samuma/ → /samːa/

• An alternative derivation suggests 狭間 (sama, “narrow space”) + 魚 (na, “fish”, ancient term, and part of the roots of modern reading sakana), where ma again references the narrowness of the fish's body, but this is problematic, as 間 (ma) can only refer to the space between things, not the width of a thing itself.
• Another possibility is that sanma is cognate with 鯖 (saba, “mackerel”). The two kinds of fish are somewhat similar, and sanma is even called mackerel pike in English. In addition, the voiced plosive /b/ sound in modern Japanese appears to have been pre-nasalized in Old Japanese as something closer to /mb/, and there is evidence of /b/ ⇔ /m/ alternation in various terms in Japanese. There is also Ainu サㇺバ (samba, “mackerel”),[1] likely a borrowing either into or from Japanese. This suggests that modern sanma may have arisen as an /m/ ⇔ /b/ alteration of older sanba.

The 秋刀魚 spelling likely arose quite recently in 1922 during the Taisho period, when a popular poem by Haruo Satō used this spelling. It alludes to the fish's harvest season of autumn (秋) and its blade-shaped body (刀).[2]

• (Tokyo) さんま [sàńmá] (Heiban – [0])[2][3]
• IPA^(key): [sã̠mːa̠]

秋刀魚(さんま) or 秋刀魚(サンマ) • (sanma) 

1. the Pacific saury or mackerel pike, Cololabis saira

   Synonym: さいら (saira)

As with many terms that name organisms, this term is often spelled in katakana, especially in biological contexts (where katakana is customary), as サンマ.

• 秋刀魚(さんま)飯(めし) (sanmameshi)

• 目(め)黒(ぐろ)の秋刀魚(さんま) (meguro no sanma)

• Etymology entry for 秋刀魚 at Japan Dictionary (in Japanese): http://www.nihonjiten.com/data/45619.html
• Etymology entry for 秋刀魚 at Gogen Jiten (Etymology Dictionary; in Japanese): http://gogen-allguide.com/sa/sanma.html