Etymological connection between 戻る and 元 It just crossed my mind that both and sound really similar. The Japanese Wiktionary page on even lists its first definition as "". Consonants becoming voiced also seems to be common in Japanese, such as through the process of , so becoming doesn't seem too far-fetched either. Since I don't have access to (or know of) a good etymology dictionary, I figured I could ask here if derives from . (In before the connection between the two words is really obvious to every good speaker...)

My source here is the _Nihon Kokugo Dai Jiten_ entry here at Kotobank, where the verb is the fifth section down, starting with the line ().

According to this, the verb is first cited to a text from roughly 1001 with an unvoiced middle consonant as . I think this bolsters the idea that this is a verb derived from the noun (spelled variously in kanji as etc.). The voiced appears later, apparently in the 1200s or 1300s. My suspicion is that the bilabial nasal //m-// at the start of the word may have gradually caused voicing of the following //-t-// to result in voiced //-d-//. There may also have been a need to differentiate from homophonous verb with the same []{LHL} pitch pattern, but a different meaning ("to bend something, to warp something").