[anrakushi]

to be honest i have no idea about that word itself. you would need to find a scholar for that.. haha. you are correct about the pronunciation except the the hu is a stronger 'h' sound in chinese than the hu/fu sound of japanese. this is not taking into account tone in chinese.

i would imagine it was taken from the chinese language origanally as it uses the 音読み (chinese reading) it has just evolved over time to sound quite different to chinese. as i mentioned in the earlier post we need to remember there are many dialects in china the sound quite different and in 1500 years languages evolve a lot to sound very different. chinese and japanese have both changed a lot from when this word would have been introduced.

the reason for my lengthy post was that i didn't want you to write off chinese as being the origin of the word simply because it comes from a different language group. English is a west germanic langauge and french is a romance language but french influence is huge. as i said if you are interested look into language transfer and language contact.

i just checked with my friend who happens to be a Japanese teacher and she agrees with me that most words in Japanese made up for 2 漢字 or more are read using the 音読み (chinese reading). which if you look in a dictionary, in papers etc, it is a hell of a lot of words. as i said it is about language transfer/contact so the sounds will change over time to even sound quite different. i would not be surprised if well over 50% of the words have chinese origins.

i remember watching a documentary on the english language and scholars have so much text that they cannot work out because the language has changed to much it is unrecognisable.