#kakaru

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罹る - kakaru - to suffer from 

雇う - yatou - to employ/ to hire, to charter  

覆う - oou - to cover; to hide; to conceal; to wrap; to disguise

Once upon a time, this total nerd named Micah did some etymological detective-work on his moniker Kakaru to see if it meant something in the Matoran Language. What he discovered was pretty nerdy, and also pretty awesome. Well, I asked if he'd object to me nerding out on the same topic. He didn't, so I did. Nerds.

The name under examination is kakaru, as noted, and I have it on the highest authority that it means something similar to "thief". Well, let's see if the facts line up, shall we? Ideas begin to coalesce...yes, let's get started:

There’s a word aku that I’ve defined as "sight, vision" (viz. akaku "x-ray vision", derived from aku via reduplication: aku-aku > akaku). I’ve also tentatively proposed that aku originates from a verbal stem ko-ya "to see, know" via this weird (but also pretty frickin' useful) process of "splitting and displacement" of the verbal particle ya: ko-ya > a-ko-i > akoi > aku.

Alright, following those exact lines of thought, here's some speculation on kakaru. Note the aru. Pretty close to aku, no? If we reverse-engineer things along the same lines, here's what we get: aru < aroi < a-ro-i < ro-ya. That makes ro-ya our original form. What could this mean? It's clearly a verb, and it's formed from a stem ro, very similar to already-attested rho "line, edge" and oro "word; unit (of communication)". I’d speculate further that these terms have a common source, something in the semantic domain of "individuation, separation, clarity, etc."

Anyways, based on this, I’d further speculate that ro-ya means something like "to determine, individuate, single out" (take?). If this is the correct approach, aru would translate to a deverbal noun of similar meaning: "individuation, identification, singling out".

So that takes care of the aru half of kakaru. What about the rest (kak-)? Lots of options here, to be honest, but if we're convinced that it means something analoguous to "thief", that narrows things down a bit. What is being "singled out" (aru)? Right off the bat we've got ka "power, force, energy" as a good possibility. Interestingly, because of its general connotations, I don't think it'd be much of a stretch to extend the meaning of ka to "value". After that, we could go with the intensive affix -ak, ka-ak meaning something like "great power/energy/value". Another possibility would be that kak- is a reduction of an earlier kaki, from ka  and ki "piece, part (of)", translating roughly to "piece of value". I like that a little better, personally. Gives it some flare.

And the upshot of all this talk is an (alternative) etymology for kakaru as follows:

kakaru  |n.cmpd.|  thief; lit. "singling out/taking 'great-value' OR 'things-of-value'" [mult. possible etym: One proposal is kakaru < ka-ak-aru, from ka "power, energy; value", the intensive particle -ak, and aru "individuation, identification, singling out". Another proposal is kakaru < kaki-aru, from kaki "piece of power/energy/value" and aru "individuation, identification, singling out"]

Who would've thought?