Does the use of 百足 as ateji for ムカデ come from calquing "centipede" (or a cognate)?


The English word "centipede" refers to basically the same type of disgusting
creepy-crawly arthropod as the Japanese ムカデ. Sometimes, ムカデ is written in
kanji as 百足. This is an obvious case of ateji (you would never read 百 in
isolation as ム or ムカ, nor 足 as カデ or デ).

It so happens that "centipede" comes from the Latin _centi-_ "hundred" +
_pedis_ "foot". This suggests that it is certainly possible that the use of 百足
("hundred" + "foot") stems from a direct calque of "centipede", or a cognate
of "centipede" in some other language like Dutch or Portuguese. Is this in
fact the case?

* * *

Note: it is entirely possible that the answer to this question is well-known
and readily available in standard online sources. I wouldn't know, since I
have not actually done any research on this topic, because that entails a risk
of coming across pictures of centipedes. I do hope you will forgive me this.




百足 is an ancient Chinese colloquial name for a sort of arthropod. It can be
traced to the 6th century document Book of Wei, which includes the passage
百足之蟲，至死不僵，以扶之者眾也 -> "A worm with a hundred feet does not go stiff upon death,
since it has many support". The phrase has since found its way into common
Chinese idiom in a slightly altered form.

The term 百足 was explained in some ancient texts as an alternate name for
millipedes (馬陸/馬蚿), although it probably referred to any arthropods in the
Myriapoda subphylum. That meaning passed into Japanese knowledge when Chinese
medicinal texts were adopted (for some reason centipedes and millipedes were
ingredients for Chinese medicine).

So the term definitely predates Japanese contact with the word centipede.

As for the reading, apart from the ももがて explanation, another theory is that
ムカデ was originally 六十手 (c.f. the pronunciation of 10 as "ga" in the surname
五十嵐), and that this reading was applied to 百足 later.

