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From: Aidan Kehoe <kehoea@parhasard.net>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Lama and Yama
Date: Sat, 14 Sep 2024 06:51:19 +0100
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 Ar an triú lá déag de mí Méan Fómhair, scríobh Jeff Barnett: 

 > Question from a non-linguist:
 > 
 > My pleasure reading of Oriental fiction and myth seem to frequently run into
 > the words "Lama" and "Yama". The first usually refers to a holy man and the
 > second to a God. Of course the words sound fairly similar to my ear. So I am
 > curious: Are they were derived from a common origin?

Wikipedia documents the first as Tibetan, with “guru” being the appropriate
Sanskrit term, the second is itself Sanskrit. Tibetan is a Sino-Tibetan
language, Sanskrit is Indo-European. With them coming from distinct language
families, absent other evidence the way to bet is that they are not derived
from a common origin.

 > I briefly poked around the internet and found nothing that was based on
 > anything other than it sounded cute to say "Lama Yama" or "Yama Lama" three
 > times quickly. Since I really don't know how to find the right hole to force a
 > search engine into, I thought I'd try you all.

-- 
‘As I sat looking up at the Guinness ad, I could never figure out /
How your man stayed up on the surfboard after fourteen pints of stout’
(C. Moore)