The prevailing view that namo represents an older form of the optative suffix namu emerged in the early twentieth century and has since achieved widespread acceptance, becoming nearly unquestioned in modern commentaries and dictionaries. However, such a view rests on tenuous foundations. This paper reexamines several contested attestations in Old Japanese sources as well as long-standing semantic theories that continue to shape scholarly discourse. The findings indicate that namo cannot be easily regarded as an antecedent of namu , a conclusion with theoretical implications for its etymology that will also be explored.
Giovanni Pasa (Thu,) studied this question.