I had this passing thought as a non-Japanese speaker and began looking up the etymology of “ninja” but the origins of the word are, to all appearances, based on a western misunderstanding of its prevalence in Japanese. I also have no idea what they look like on paper for the purposes of assessing if they share a common root as their English pronunciation implies.
I’m curious about this to the extent that their etymological relationship could expose how one or both of these words is derived from a metaphor that eventually came to be taken literally.
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I suspect you are being misled by someone. What metaphor? What western misunderstanding? 忍者 (ninja) is the Japanese word that means exactly what you think it means. It has nothing to do with 人間 (ningen).
忍者 – ninja
人間 – ningen
忍 – means to hide or to endure and given that ninja were basically spies, that’s where they got their name. They were historically known as 忍び – shinobi and other local names.
And, while, yes, there is a lot of misunderstandings about ninja, even among Japanese, they did exist did have clans/schools.
https://ninja-official.com/whats-ninja?lang=en
I do not believe there is a specific etymological relationship here
人間 for Ningen
忍者 for Ninja
Unless there are different words you are asking about.
What “Western Misunderstandings” and “metaphor” are you referring to?
I have never heard of “Ninja” and “Person” being associated with each other on an etymology level
Only the particle ‘nin’, meaning ‘one’, in the sense of ‘a person’. ‘Gen’, on its own, means something like ‘image’, or ‘visual form’, and ‘ja’, as in combination with ‘non’, at least, means ‘to endure’. So, ‘ningen’ means ‘human form’, or ‘likeness of a human’ (think ‘… created man in our image…’), and ‘ninja’ means ‘one who endures’. The kanji used may also play a significant role in the meaning, as read/interpreted.
Ningen: ‘人間’
Ninja: ‘忍者’
They’re not even slightly related.
This is like saying that 銀行 (ginkou, ‘bank’) and 線香 (senkou, ‘incense) must *clearly* be related because the ‘kou’ part is pronounced the same in English. That is absurd.
Japanese has a lot of homophones (e.g. 先頭, 戦闘, and 銭湯, all pronounced ‘sentou’, but meaning ‘head (of a line)’, ‘combat’, and ‘public bath’ respectively). It would be a ridiculous ask to expect every single *partial* homophone, let alone full homophone, to have some kind of shared etymological ancestor.