What is the etymological connection between sake (alcohol) and sha-ke (salmon)?


I read once somewhere that the word 'sake' (酒, Japanese rice wine) comes from
sha-ke (鮭, salmon). Can someone explain what this connection is?

Any thoughts on why _most Japanese people_ * don't know the origin of the word
sake are also appreciated.

_*Most Japanese people who I know ... @Tsuyoshi Ito may know more._




What is the connection? None, apparently.

According to [語源由来辞典](http://gogen-allguide.com/sa/sake.html) (always a good
place to check on that sort of question), none of the likely etymologies have
anything to do with "sha-ke" or fish in general.

The above site mentions a couple of theories for the etymology of the word
"さけ", including:

  * 汁【しる】 ＋ 食【け】  
'soup' 'eat/food'

  * 栄【さか】え水【みず】  
'water that makes you prosper'

but goes on to state that the most plausible etymology is the following: さ is
a prefix (of unspecified meaning) attached to き, an older word for sake. The
final vowel assumedly changed somewhere along the way.




Let me say a word about the secondary part of the question:

> Any thoughts on why _most Japanese people_ * don't know the origin of the
> word sake are also appreciated.

A simple answer is because understanding the etymology requires study and
research and most Japanese people are not linguists. Ask an average English
speaker what the etymological connection is between, say, _meal_ and _meat_ ,
and I would not expect that you will get any answer beyond a guess. Being
fluent in a language does not mean that one knows the etymology.

But there is something more on this. I heard that even when you ask linguists,
it is often more difficult to trace the origin of a word in Japanese than in
English. This is because the origin of the Japanese language itself is unclear
(see [Japonic languages](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japonic_languages) and
the [classification of
Japonic](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_Japonic)). If you
think about the etymological study as a kind of detective work, there is often
not much clue on which a theory about the origin of a word can be built. On
the other hand, there are [many languages](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-
European_languages) which have common origins with English, and it is often
possible to get some clue by comparing them.

