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Is there any relation to "[anatta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatta)", the
Buddhist concept of non-self? I've heard that Japanese has some slight
Pali/Sanskrit influences due to the arrival of Buddhism in Japan. Could these
words be related or are their phonetic and semantic similarities only a
coincidence?
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2020-02-23T22:26:15.907
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etymology
What is the etymology of the word あなた?
No, it originally meant roughly the same thing as あちら, and formed a pattern
with こなた, そなた, and どなた.
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2020-02-23T23:07:48.947
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answer
Adding on to Aeon Akechi's post.

# Derivation of あなた

This breaks down to three distinct parts.

> あ

**Distal** : Distal marker, in other words, indicates things that are distant
from both speaker and listener. This is the same あ that we see in other common
terms like あそこ, あちら, あの, あれ, etc.

This あ appears to have derived from older か, as we see with the ancient "that
thing over there" meaning for かれ (now in modern Japanese, this means "he"),
which later shifted to あれ (which still means "that thing over there"). Indeed,
we even see かなた as an older synonym for あなた.

> な

**Possessive** : this appears to be a shifted form of possessive particle の.

> た

**Locative** : Ancient term meaning "direction, side, place". Not found as a
productive element in the modern language, although it remains in a few fixed
terms.

# Sense development

This is based on details gleaned from Shogakukan's 国語大辞典【こくごだいじてん】 entry
[here](https://kotobank.jp/word/%E5%BD%BC%E6%96%B9%E3%83%BB%E8%B2%B4%E6%96%B9-2002826).

### Late 800s, early 900s: _"yonder"_ (place)

At its oldest, we see precursor form かなた, with quotes starting from 883. That
initial //k-// starts to drop out not too much later in the early 900s,
yielding the first quotes of あなた. The meanings for both かなた and あなた were
_"that direction way over there"_ , roughly similar to English term
_"yonder"_.

### Late 900s: _"yonder"_ (time in the past)

A time-related sense of _"way back when"_ appears in the late 900s, as an
extension of the _"yonder"_ meaning.

### Late 900s: _"yon person"_

This is where we start to see specific development of a pronoun usage pattern.
When this sense referring to a person first appears in texts (first quote in
the [_Ochikubo
Monogatari_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ochikubo_Monogatari)), it's used as
a third-person pronoun for _"yon person, that person way over there"_.

### Early 1000s: _"yonder"_ (time in the future)

There's a quote from [_The Tale of
Genji_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Genji) where あなた is
purportedly used to refer to a future time.

### Mid-1700s: _"you"_ (polite)

Finally, in the 1750s, we start to get quotes where あなた is used to mean
_"you"_ -- that is, the speaker is referring to the listener.

# Usage patterns

Much like これ・それ・あれ・どれ, the word あなた also exists in a cluster, as
こなた・そなた・あなた・どなた. And the usage patterns were also broadly similar:

  * **こ～** : referred to things closer to the speaker
  * **そ～** : referred to things that were farther from the speaker but closer to the listener
  * **あ～** : referred to things far from both speaker and listener
  * **ど～** : referred to the indefinite, the question word

こなた and そなた have mostly fallen out of use, outside of deliberately archaic
contexts like manga or historical dramas.

  * こなた literally meant _"this way"_ , was extended to mean _"this person"_ , and in that sense, it could be used to loosely refer to _"I"_ / _"we"_ ("this person [who is speaking to you]") or _"you"_ / _"you all"_ ("this person [to whom I'm speaking]"), depending on context. 
  * そなた literally meant _"that way nearby"_ , was extended to mean _"that person close to the listener"_ , and in that sense, it was also used to mean _"you, the listener"_. This _"you"_ sense is already found as far back as the mid-700s in the [_Man'yōshū_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27y%C5%8Dsh%C5%AB) poetry compilation.
  * あなた shifted as above from _"that person"_ to _"you"_. 
  * どなた persists as the polite way of saying _"who"_. 

# Derivation of Pali term _anattā_ "non-self"

The Pali term _anattā_ comes from two components:

> _an_

Prefix indicating _"not, un-"_ This is ultimately the same component we see in
numerous modern languages that derive from Proto-Indo-European (PIE),
including English.

> _attā_

From older Sanskrit _ātman_ , this meant _"soul"_ , but also _"self"_ , as
well as a few other things (see the [related entries at the Spoken Sansrkit
dictionary](http://spokensanskrit.org/index.php?mode=3&script=ia&tran_input=Atman&direct=au&anz=100),
where the long-a _ā_ is input as capital-A).

# Conclusion

> Is there any relation to "[anatta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatta)",
> the Buddhist concept of non-self?

No. The two terms have very different roots and different senses through
recorded history. The resemblance is pure chance. This is due in part to the
simple fact that human mouths can only make so many intelligible sounds,
making "collisions" in the data inevitable -- cases where word X in language Y
just happens to have a similar pronunciation and meaning to a word A in
language B.

If you're interested in this side of linguistics, I can highly recommend the
Zompist essay [_How likely are chance resemblances between
languages?_](https://www.zompist.com/chance.htm) The author explains the
statistics behind this phenomenon, right down to equations that calculate the
likelihood of similarities.

* * *

Please comment with any questions about the above.
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