[ot] Swedish langauge

[Michael Tree]

Originally posted by Alzrius


It's basically pictograms. The value is that, unlike letters, the character drawn out has an intrinsic meaning, one that doesn't rely on pronounciation.

That's not strictly true. Only about 10% of Chinese characters are actually pictograms, physically depicting what they mean. The rest are a combination of phonetic and pictographic. Basically, to depict an abstract or complex word, the character of a homophone (another character that is pronounced the same way) is used, with another character stuck next to it to signify a meaning.

To create an example in English, say the character % represents the word 'fly', meaning an insect. To create the verb 'to fly' you might use % with the pictogram for 'wings' next to it. To create the character for 'fly' meaning 'zipper' you might use % with the character for 'clothes' next to it.

Such symbols are further complicated as the years when on, as complex symbols were added to other complex symbols, and so on. A lot of linguistic drift has also occured since the characters were first standardized, so what used to be homophones are no longer. To make it even more complicated, different characters achieved their final standardized forms at greatly different times, so characters created in 1500 AD might be loosely homophones, but not at all when compared to ones from 200 BC.

Another common misconception is the belief that most chinese characters are words. Most Chinese (well, Mandarin and Cantonese, anyway) words have two syllables, and different unique characters are used for each syllable. These characters may have a meaning in the dictionary, but are never used in isolation.

To use an example from English, if English used a Chinese-esque system, we might have a character 'er', defined in the dictionary as 'family member' to write the final er in Mother, Father, Brother, Sister. But we couldn't talk about 'ers'. It's meaningless except in combination with other characters.

A third misconception is that all asian languages are related. Some certainly are (chinese dialects, vietnamese, thai, and others), but Chinese and Japanese are about as closely related as English and Japanese. Japanese is completely unrelated to Chinese and English, but has borrowed a lot of words and writing systems from both. English is more closely related to Hindi and Tamil than Chinese is to Japanese, while Japanese is more closely related to Hungarian and Finnish than it is to Chinese.

 

[Sixchan]

The reasons are largely historical. I suspect that the English words for other countries come originally from the French, since both use the same names, adjusted for phonolgy and linguistic drift.

Germany no doubt comes from the Latin Germania (pronounced with a hard 'G'.

Japan is probably an indirect corruption of Nihon, through Nippon. Say, what's the Dutch word for Japan? English's word may have come from them, since they were among the first to trade with the Japanese. It might also come from the Chinese word.

It's from the Malay word 'Japang', which is derived from the Mandarin Chinese name, which is derived from the Middle Chinese name that was created by Japanese scholars who simplified it into the Japanese Nihon.

Skill Focus: Google.

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=japan&r=67

 

[tarchon]

writing systems from both. English is more closely related to Hindi and Tamil than Chinese is to Japanese, while Japanese is more closely related to Hungarian and Finnish than it is to Chinese.

Not Tamil, Tamil is Dravidian. Many Tamils would be very quick to point that out too (there's some sort of "Dravidian pride" movement out there somewhere) . You're probably confusing Finno-Ugric with Ural-Altaic too, the latter being what Japanese is most commonly posited to belong too, though it's still a hotly debated topic.

 

[Michael Tree]

Not Tamil, Tamil is Dravidian. Many Tamils would be very quick to point that out too (there's some sort of "Dravidian pride" movement out there somewhere) . You're probably confusing Finno-Ugric with Ural-Altaic too, the latter being what Japanese is most commonly posited to belong too, though it's still a hotly debated topic.

My apologies about the Tamil. Somwhere along the line since I briefly studied it, my wires got crossed.

I'm not a linguist - my knowledge of Chinese and Japanese written language is from historical studies about language reform around the turn of the 20th century and later. My understanding was that Finno-Ugric and Altaic are distantly related, while the Altaic and Sinitic groups are as unrelated as languages groups can be, aside from all the loan words and common orthography.

 

[Michael Tree]

It's from the Malay word 'Japang', which is derived from the Mandarin Chinese name, which is derived from the Middle Chinese name that was created by Japanese scholars who simplified it into the Japanese Nihon.

Neat. I wonder how definitive that answer is though. Dictionary.com's etymology for China is just as definitive-sounding, and it's my understanding that it's anyon'e guess about that.

 

[tarchon]

My understanding was that Finno-Ugric and Altaic are distantly related, while the Altaic and Sinitic groups are as unrelated as languages groups can be, aside from all the loan words and common orthography.

Well, at this level of relationship things get a little speculative, but, yeah, Uralic does subsume Finno-Ugric. The Ural-Altaic group is really the tenuous one, and quite a lot of linguists (which I amn't neither) don't accept it. Just the putative Proto-Uralic period goes back 7000 years, so you can imagine how wispy the proposed consanguinity between Uralic and Altaic is (there are connections, but there are plausible alternative explanations for them). And Japanese is a pretty tenuous member of Altaic anyway. Most other Altaic languages jump up and down screaming "I am Altaic" but Japanese only has a few solidly identifiable Altaic roots, no clear evidence of vowel harmony, and it's not even agglutinative. If it is Altaic, there's been some sort of major creolization in its past, in which case it's not entirely clear whether the Altaic component was the creole-er or the creole-ee.
If I had to make a simplistic guess, I'd say it came in with the Yayoi culture, and was probably well off to the periphery of the Central-Asian Sprachbund, but who knows?