don't trust your ears
sometimes qǔxiāo and torikesu are just the same word, ya know?
← back to marticles
← back to series page for talking on paper
hey! this article isn't done yet.
you can read it if you want to, but it's probably going to have some little mistakes. also, it's going to be incomplete, because i... haven't finished it yet. if you want to read it though, that's okay, but i have other finished articles that are more interesting than this one on my main page, which is linked to in the arrow up there!
this article is part of a series! ← prev | no next as of now →
it isn't just germany
— it's also not just korea!
so, that thing i said about 독일 dogil in the previous article isn't a one-off unique example. a lot of words that come from japanese in korean and in chinese, were borrowed from japanese through their spellings, not their pronunciations. here's some examples for you to look at:
note: all mandarin spellings are given in simplified orthography.
japanese | korean | mandarin | meaning |
---|---|---|---|
恐竜 kyōryū | 공룡 gongnyong < gong-ryong | 恐龙 kǒnglóng | dinosaur |
電話 denwa | 전화 jeonhwa | 电话 diànhuà | telephone |
次元 jigen | 차원 chawon | 次元 cìyuán (anime slang in mand.) | dimension |
they all sound kind of similar, don't they? this is because the morphemes (word-parts) that the characters are writing are the same across all languages — they're pronunciations borrowed from medieval chinese into japanese and korean, and that evolved within chinese to modern mandarin. hence, the borrowings here can be seen as not only spelling borrowings, but also morpheme borrowings, where each word part is "translated" to its equivalent in the other language, that has the same origin and a similar pronunciation.
what happens when japanese kyōryū, literally 'terrifying' (恐 kyō) 'dragon' (ryū 竜) becomes korean gongnyong and mandarin kǒnglóng, is similar to what happened when english television, pronounced /ˈtɛləˌvɪʒən/ tell-uh-vizhun, became french télévision, pronounced /televizjɔ̃/ teh-leh-vee-zyong. (it may have been in reverse and then the english comes from the french, but same thing; see etymonline.) they're "the same word" in the sense that both parts come from the same source, and that they're pronounced similarly, even if the words aren't pronounced the same, and they aren't close phonetic approximations of one another either.
multi-function characters
if you know what kun'yomi and on'yomi are, you can skip this section.
not all words that chinese & korean got from japanese sound this similar to their originals, though. remember that the motivation behind these borrowings isn't sound, it's spelling. and japanese doesn't only use its chinese characters to write words of chinese origin with chinese sounds — it also uses them to write native words which have the same meanings as the chinese characters that are used to write them.
as an example, the character 人, for example, can only sound like rén in mandarin and like in (a chinese-derived reading, in words like 인간 ingan 'human') in korean. in japanese though, besides the chinese-derived pronunciations nin (as in 人気 ninki 'famous') and jin (as in 人生 jinsei '(human) life'), 人 can also be read hito, which is itself the japanese word for 'person', and it can also be used to write the ri part of 一人 hitori 'one person' and 二人 futari 'two people'. both hito and -ri are native japanese elements, that do not come from chinese, but they share the meaning of 'person' with the chinese word and the character that writes it.
these two ways of using chinese characters are called on'yomi (lit. 'sound reading') when they're used to write chinese words, like ninki, and kun'yomi (lit. 'explanation reading') when they're used to write native terms such as hito and futari. korean on the other hand, despite being a non-chinese language with strong influence from chinese, just like japanese, doesn't have kun'yomi; native terms in korean, like 사람 saram 'person', are never associated with chinese characters.
cover your ears and open your eyes
anyway, let's think for a moment. if japanese uses chinese characters to write words that sound nothing like their chinese counterparts, that means that if for example mandarin takes the spelling of a japanese word, it's going to be pronounced in a way that's completely unrecognizable to the original japanese, right? even if it keeps the meanings somewhat intact. and that is exactly what happens — look at these examples here:
japanese | korean | mandarin | meaning |
---|---|---|---|
取り消す torikesu | 취소 chwiso | 取消 qǔxiāo | cancel |
割引 waribiki | 할인 harin | — | discount |
入口 iriguchi | 입구 ipgu | 入口 rùkǒu | entrance |
the chinese and korean words bear some resemblance to each other, because they're made of the same middle chinese-derived elements, but the japanese words are completely different. the meaning still stays though, kind of — korean 할인 harin is still 할 (= 割) hal 'divide' + 인 (= 引) in 'pull', not that different from japanese 割 wari 'proportion' > '10%' + -biki from 引く hiku 'pull' > 'take away, subtract'. and in all three languages, the meaning of 入口 (iriguchi · 입구 ipgu · rùkǒu) is literally 'entering mouth', despite the extremely different sound of the japanese.