one of my favorite kanji is 魔. it's pronounced ma, and means 'demon' or sometimes 'magic'. it's used in a few words, from the actually demonic 悪魔 akuma 'demon' and 魔王 maō 'demon king, dark lord', to words that have more to do with magic than demons itself, like 魔女 majo 'witch' or 魔術 majutsu 'magic'. there's also the word 魔法 mahō, which also means 'magic', and this is where the name of the anime genre 魔法少女 mahō shōjo 'magical girl' comes from. yet another word with this character, 邪魔 jama, originally meant 'a demon of perversity', but now means something as everyday as 'hindrance' or (as a verb, jama suru) 'to disturb'.
what makes this character interesting though isn't really the meaning, although the meaning is very fun: it's the etymology. the etymology of the character (or rather, "glyph origin", "etymology" isn't my favorite word for this) is really simple: 麻 is phonetic (it sounds like ma too) and you put a 鬼 (ki, oni, means 'devil', 'ogre', etc.) below it for the 'demon' meaning. but the etymology of the word is far more interesting. the word (or word-element, "morpheme" is the technical term) ma comes from middle chinese 魔 ma, which isn't really surprising, but this ma is short for 魔羅 ma la (mara in japanese). ma la is from sanskrit मार māra, which can mean 'death, pestilence', or 'slaying, killing', but is also the name of a buddhist demon.
i'm no expert in chinese buddhist demonology to tell you what these ma were all about, other than that they are a kind of demon, but i do know enough historical linguistics to tell you this: the sanskrit word māra comes from proto-indo-european *móros, which is a derivative of the root *mer-. (proto-indo-european was a language spoken around eastern europe and central asia, around five thousand years ago. we don't have any written records of it, but linguists know it existed by comparing modern languages that evolved from it.) this *mer- root is the source of the english word murder, and also (through latin) mortal and moribund. another offshoot of *mer- that found its way to english is the proto-germanic word *marǭ‚ meaning an 'evil female spirit', like a succubus, or a sleep-paralysis demon. just like in sanskrit, the root for 'to die, death' evolved into the name of a specific evil spirit or demon.
the word *marǭ doesn't exist by itself in english anymore. but there is a compound word where it still survives: nightmare! some other european languages have this same proto-germanic word in their words for 'nightmare', like french cauchemar, where the cauche- part means 'to press', and the -mar ending is from *marǭ. words for 'nightmare' in a lot of languages can be very interesting, and at least in european languages, they usually have to do with either 'pressing' (because of sleep paralysis), or with mythological sleep demons. i may even write about those another time!
anyway... i never know how to end these blog posts (this was a problem i had on my old blog too!), but i think this is all i had to tell you about today. so, now you know that mahō shōjo, as in the anime genre, is cognate with murder, mortal and nightmare!
see you next time!
jan 27 if i had written this post only a day later, maybe i could have chosen a different song. because i just found out about this syudou song that doesn't have a music video called 魔王 maō (youtube), and i've been listening to it on repeat for a few hours already! (not nonstop of course lol.) do give the song a listen, but i will say that syudou's vocaloid tuning is not for everyone. a lot of people prefer it when he sings his songs with his own voice.
jan 28 the word 魔王 maō can be really tricky to translate into english. i went with 'demon king, dark lord' as a quick explanation, but there isn't really an exact equivalent, and maōs show up a lot in games too, so different franchises and games have different ways of translating the word. here's a great article by clyde mandelin from legends of localization about the words maō and daimaō!