Taking Stock

[steepholm]

I find the kanji 株 (pron. 'kabu', though sometimes 'shu', 'kuize' or 'kabuta') very interesting. It has numerous meanings, including 'share' (as in company shares), 'strain' (as in a strain of bacteria), and 'stump' (as in tree stump).

What's interesting about it is that, in English, the word 'stock' has the same set of apparently disparate meanings. You can buy stocks in a company, heredity is often referred to in the same terms (plant stocks, etc.), and 'stock' is a word, albeit obselescent, for tree trunks too - as in Milton's 'When all our fathers worshiped stocks and stones'.

Behind all these various meanings of 'stock' I think it's possible to trace the image of some kind of branching family tree going back to a common root. A financial stock, for example, can be seen as a slip taken from the root stock of a company - if you want to look at it like that. That's fairly interesting in itself, but it fascinates me that the same set of connections was made not once but twice, in English and Japanese. Coincidence? Or was there some influence? I don't know, for example, whether share trading was a thing in Japan before the Meiji era. If not, that use of 株 may have been modelled on English usage.

Comments

[larryhammer]

Interesting -- in Mandarin, 株 is zhū, with a primary meaning of tree trunk, though also a stump or the roots themselves, strain as in bacteria, "to involve others (in shady business)," and a measure word for trees and plants (I've never met it used as that last -- 棵 is the usual measure for trees). No company stocks at all.

[steepholm]

That's useful info! As "shu" (the onyomi reading) it's also a counter for trees in Japanese. But that does lend a little weight to my speculation that the company stock sense may have been coined through a Meiji-era analogy with the English word.