Horsefly and “Magariya”

From the History of Words to Culture History

Abstract

The essential approach and object of Linguistic Geography is to establish the history of words or some linguistic forms by analyzing distribution maps or linguistic atlases. But it is only the relative history of those forms that we can speculate on from the linguistic atlas and from some theories and rules about linguistic changes. So we have to make the most of other non-linguistic data at the same time in order to know the absolute history of the forms.
In the center of Tohoku district (west-central part of Iwate prefecture and eastcentral part of Akita prefecture), we can recognize some local dialectical forms of the word for“horsefly”. The dialectical forms can be divided into four groups as follows,
A; ((ushi-abu)),
B; ((umasashi-abu)),
C; ((hachi-abu)),
D; the others,
In order to see the conditions of their distribution, these groups can be arranged as A……→B……→C from the oldest to the newest.
Analysis shows that the distribution area of the word “umasashi-abu” corresponds with that of the house type “magari-ya”, which is characteristic of this region. “magari-ya” has been produced functionally so as to be convenient to feed horses (“Nambu-goma”). The name “umasashi-abu” means “the troublesome horsefly which stings horses and cows and sucks their blood”, demonstrating the sympathy of mankind for horses.
So, our conclusions are that these two must have developed almost simultaneously, and that the linguistic change from A to B occured in the early Edo period when the policy of the Nambu feudal clan recommending that people raise horses spread over its administrative territory.