Is the interjection おう really a Chinese loanword?


In Samuel E. Martin's "A Reference Grammar of Japanese", in a section (Chapter
23, p. 1041) on putative etymologies for some Japanese interjections like さあ
or まあ, he asserts:

> Although others [other interjections] seem like little more than grunts or
> shouts — aa, yaa, yoo — they may have originated as shortenings of more
> legitimate etyma; oo 'yea' is, after all, a Chinese loanword.

Really? If so, a loan from which Chinese word?




I think Martin has 応 (old form 應) in mind. This was not uncommonly used to
write _ō_ , especially in Edo times. A famous haiku by Kyorai:

> 応々といへどたたくや雪の門  
>  ō ō to / iedo tataku ya / yuki no kado  
>  "All right, all right!" / I say, but the knocking doesn't stop / at the
> gate in the snow

However, I agree with the commenters that _ō_ is unlikely to have been
borrowed from Chinese at all -- not least because it appears in the Nihon
Shoki as 越々, i.e. /wowo/ (which incidentally isn't easy to reconcile with any
Chinese pronunciation of 応/應), and only got attached to 応/應 later.




I think Martin has 応 (old form 應) in mind. This was not uncommonly used to
write _ō_ , especially in Edo times. A famous haiku by Kyorai:

> 応々といへどたたくや雪の門  
>  ō ō to / iedo tataku ya / yuki no kado  
>  "All right, all right!" / I say, but the knocking doesn't stop / at the
> gate in the snow

However, I agree with the commenters that _ō_ is unlikely to have been
borrowed from Chinese at all -- not least because it appears in the Nihon
Shoki as 越々, i.e. /wowo/ (which incidentally isn't easy to reconcile with any
Chinese pronunciation of 応/應), and only got attached to 応/應 later.

