Fraggle...please teach me...

Sorry, you picked a language that I know very little about.

The only language for which a positive relationship has been established with Japanese is that of the Ryukyu Islands. Beyond that it's conjecture. Some linguists suspect that Japanese and Korean belong to the Mongolic family, but the evidence is too weak to start putting that in the textbooks. Mongolic may be in a superfamily with Ural-Altaic and Finno-Ugric but that's still a little weak too. That would put Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Turkish, Hungarian, Finnish and dozens of other Asian languages together.

As for Japanese and Chinese, there's no relation unless the Nostratus hypothesis turns out to be correct, and all non-African languages go back 60,000 years to a common ancestor that was brought out by the first humans to successfully migrate out of Africa. It's very unlikely that we'll ever have that answer because languages change too quickly. Grammar, vocabulary, syntax, phonetics, probably everything can change completely to the point of being unrecognizable, in a much shorter time than 60,000 years.

What Chinese does have is an enormous influence on Japanese, on a par with the influence of French on English after the Norman Invasion in 1066. Chinese Buddhist monks traveled to Japan around 1500 years ago. (That's a very rough date, I'm not looking it up.) At that time Japan was still a Bronze Age civilization, with no written language. The monks basically brought Chinese Iron Age civilization with them. Japanese assimilated thousands of Chinese words for concepts, activities and artifacts they had never seen before.

They also borrowed the Chinese writing system. Since it's not phonetic, that was a very interesting event. First off they just wrote the Chinese words they borrowed in their native Chinese characters or hanzi. But then they also used that same character set for the native Japanese words with the same meaning.

A digression, I'm using "word" in two senses. Chinese vocabulary is made up of one-syllable morphemes, which are combined as needed to form words, but each morpheme also has a root meaning and can stand alone as a one-syllable word. The Japanese borrowed the two-, three- or more-syllable "words" and the characters that transcribe the individual syllables. But they also used the individual characters to write their own words that translate the one-syllable words that the characters stood for. Japanese builds compound words like Chinese, German and even English, so the system works for them; it would not work in Spanish.

Since then the Japanese invented a syllabary--an alphabet in which each symbol stands for a whole syllable rather than a phoneme--to write their grammatical inflections and other bits that weren't easily rendered in hanzi. There are two parallel syllabaries, one for Japanese words and one for phonetic transcriptions of foreign words. If you're literate you're also expected to know the Roman alphabet.

So to read Japanese you have to know a minimum of 2,000 Chinese characters, two Japanese syllabaries of 50 symbols each, and the Roman alphabet. And wait it gets worse. When you see a Chinese character you have to know whether to pronounce it as a Chinese word or a Japanese word!

Japanese phonetics has drifted in 1500 years, so the way they pronounce those old "Chinese" words is no longer accurate. Chinese phonetics has also drifted, and they don't pronounce those words the same way any more either.

The first two Chinese go masters back in the 1960s had to take up residence in Japan in order to make a career of playing go, and the Japanese read the characters in their names the way they pronounce them today. The difference between Chinese and Japanese after 1500 years of phonetic drift was striking. Their Chinese names are Wu Qing Yuan and Lin Hai Feng. The Japanese call them Go Sei Gen and Rin Kai Ho.

Then by chance other words are still recognizable. "Telephone" (literally electricity-speech) is dian hua in Mandarin and den wa in Japanese.

The name of the country itself is Chinese: "Sun Root," meaning the place the sun appears to rise from--as seen from China! It's been mangled phonetically. In Mandarin it's Ri ben but in Japanese it's pronounced Ni hon. Chinese R is a cross between a French J and a Czech Ř, so you can see that our pronunciation, Ja-pan, was taken from the Chinese name for the country.

Oh, and those hanzi? You probably know them by their Japanese name, kanji.

 

Well that's a common technique. If you can't answer somebody's question, you just try to dazzle them with stuff they didn't ask about.

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Its a reasonable question for an American. My people are notorious for being monolingual and expecting everyone else to speak English.

I have studied five languages in formal classes. In order of fluency: Spanish, German, Mandarin, Yiddish (universities put on some amazing extension programs) and Russian. I also learned Esperanto from a book, which works for Esperanto. I've studied many others informally, three of them to the extent that I can carry on a conversation about a go game including a few personal remarks in the chat window on a go website: Portuguese, Italian and French. (Despite the greater formality of my study my Russian is not adequate for such a dialog.)

But the other stuff, the linguistics as opposed to the languages, I just picked that up by being interested. An article here, a chat with a scholar in a particular language there, and some digging when an idea springs into my mind that may turn out to be correct.

No you don't. My life has had many incredibly long and sad parts. On the balance I'm glad that I've been able to contribute to civilization by being an "elder." Perhaps I've satisfied the requirement that I set for every citizen of earth: give back a little bit more to civilization than you take out. But I've spent much of my life being in my own way and disappointing people who deserved better. Surely you can beat that and still learn about linguistics.

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I'm surprised that they say that. Based upon what I've been told, except for pronunciation, I thought Chinese is one of the easiest languages to learn and Japanese is one of the most difficult.

For starters, Chinese is spoken rather slowly because fewer syllables are required to express a thought than most (or perhaps all) other languages. By my tally, about seven syllables in Chinese versus ten in English or French, which are very compact languages. Contrast that with 15-20 in Spanish or Italian which, with their polysyllabic words, have to be spoken at lightning speed to get the meaning across. Japanese is even worse, the pronoun "you" has three syllables and "I" has four.

When a language is spoken slowly it makes it easier for a student or a foreigner to parse the sentences because he can find the place where one word ends and the next begins. The phonetic structure of Mandarin makes that even easier, because each syllable is a morpheme and they can only end in N, NG or a vowel. I can always pick out the words I know in a conversation in Mandarin. Spanish, which I know much better, often races right past me with no comprehension.

Chinese has virtually no grammar, only nouns and verbs and a few particles like de which are really little more than markers for parsing sentences. To be precise, it has a micro-grammar, with rules that apply in only a small number of cases such as the "measure words," which you can learn one at a time. (Or just fake it; no one will misunderstand you if the only measure word you know is ge.) No grammatical tricks for expressing person, tense, number, etc.; just toss in a noun or a verb if you need to be more precise.

Most Indo-European languages, in contrast, have elaborate macro-grammars with seven or more "parts of speech," gigantic paradigms of inflections for verbs with six or more tenses and modes plus person and number, nouns and adjectives and articles that have to agree in number and gender (whatever the heck that is), and a frustrating list of prepositions left over from the Stone Age that can accurately describe a maximum of about twenty relationships, which we increase by about one every five hundred years.

Japanese goes beyond the worst case of the Indo-European languages, which I suspect is Romanian, or maybe one of the Slavic languages. It has inflections for shades of meaning that are not even part of our consciousness, such as the relative social standing of the speaker to the person spoken to. I have a friend who was a visiting professor in Japan and came back fluent in the language and sometimes takes on translation work in addition to being a hotshot physics professor and a go master. A friend asked him to translate a novel into Japanese (his first non-academic experience) and on the second page he was stumped because he realized he never learned how to conjugate verbs in the feminine.

In addition, we're accustomed to languages whose syntax follows a recognizable pattern such as subject-verb-object or subject-object-verb. Japanese syntax--although not unusual as languages go--is completely alien to us: topic-description.

Japanese will definitely expand your consciousness and teach you how to think differently.

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