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Preface: I do not know Japanese, so please forgive any misnomers and
inaccuracies. Also please forgive the crude transcriptions of the Japanese
sounds; I mean no offense.

When watching anime/playing video games with Japanese soundtracks, I've often
heard characters exclaim "ばかな!", apparently roughly transliterated as "ba ka
na", which many anime/videogames translate as "impossible" and sounds to me
eerily like bu4 ke3 neng2 (不可能 - "impossible" in Chinese). It's obviously
tempting for me, with my Chinese background, to think that the phonological
similarity is something more than coincidence: for example, I've heard the
phrase "KAI SEE" in contexts where it quite obviously corresponds to Chinese
kai1shi3/開始, so in some instances such similarities are actually not
coincidental. But in this case it seems rather dubious to me that "ba ka na"
is some Japanese reading of 不可能, which is a bit "too Chinese" of a
construction, and I'd like to settle the speculation for good by inquiring as
to the true genesis of this phrase.

So, where did this expression come from? One colleague argued that it stems
from the the Japanese word "baka" (馬鹿), in which case I suppose one possible
path towards the present meaning of "ba ka na" might be something like "this
[situation] is just stupid" > "are you kidding me" > "impossible". Is this
accurate, or is it sui generis, or something else entirely? It's driving me a
bit mad, since right now everything time my ears hear "ba ka na", my brain
hears "bu ke neng".
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-11-22T22:58:28.827
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2016-11-24T04:48:36.587
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question
slang
What is the origin/etymology of the phrase "ばかな" meaning "impossible!"
This ばかな is actually 馬鹿な, which is a [na-
adjective](http://thejapanesepage.com/grammar/na_adjectives) meaning
_ridiculous_ , _absurd_ , _stupid_ , etc., used as an interjection.

I don't know Chinese, but Japanese does have a word 不可能, which is relativelly
common. However 不可能 is rarely used as an interjection, and is read as ふかのう (
_fu-ka-noh_ ) in modern Japanese. So the sound similarity of 馬鹿な and 不可能 (in
Chinese) must be a mere coincidence. Many Japanese words are of Chinese
origin, but their reading are usually different between modern Chinese and
modern Japanese. See [Sino-Japanese
vocabulary](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Japanese_vocabulary) for
details.
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-11-23T00:35:28.480
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2016-11-24T04:48:36.587
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That probably comes from the phrase:

> そんな馬鹿なことはない。  
>  Such a stupid thing is impossible.

<http://ejje.weblio.jp/sentence/content/%22%E3%81%9D%E3%82%93%E3%81%AA%E3%81%B0%E3%81%8B%E3%81%AA%22>

So I agree with your colleague.
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2016-11-23T04:35:24.543
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2016-11-23T05:38:21.693
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answer