Are Chinese Japanese & Korean Related?
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SOURCES & FURTHER READING
How Similar Are Chinese, Korean, and Japanese: blog.speak.social/how-similar...
Chinese Japanese & Korean: www.milestoneloc.com/chinese-...
Sino-Tibetan: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Ti...
Japonic: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japonic...
Koreanic: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koreani...
Altaic: www.sciencedirect.com/topics/...
Chinese Characters: / chinese-characters-han...
Why Isn’t There A Chinese Alphabet?: www.berlitz.com/blog/chinese-...
What Are Hanja?: www.meridianlinguistics.com/t...
Hiragana & Katakanna: heritageofjapan.wordpress.com...
History Of Chinese Characters: www.thechairmansbao.com/blog/...
Chinese Characters: www.bbc.co.uk/languages/chine...
Japanese Writing Systems: ai.glossika.com/blog/history-...
Hangul: www.britannica.com/topic/Hang...
Austroasiatic: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austroa...
Do you speak any of these languages?
@@User-xh5zu That's neither Korean, Japanese nor Chinese. Lmao.
@@aardappeleten7701 nvm I thought he said "do you speak any other languages" asin other then English for some reason lol
Thanks for excellent video, explaining is always top notch, 💯🎩👍
I speak Chinese (Cantonese and Mandarin) and learned some Japanese and Korean in college and I learned Vietnamese when I met my ex-wife. Even though an ethnic Chinese born in Vietnam, I didn't have a chance to learn it when I was growing up in the USA.
Yes I know all three but you got several things quite wrong, see my comment I will write momentarily.
People often note that katakana is used for foreign words, but what’s less often mentioned is how it’s used for made-up words, too. Like all the Japanese Pokémon names are katakana.
J.J. McCullough in the wild? What a pleasant surprise!
Katakana is also used often for animals, plants, and minerals in general.
@@coolbrotherf127 a lot of those would probably fall into the category of “foreign.” What is interesting to me is when the Japanese use katakana for a Japanese word or name that was made up in Japan.
Fancy seeing you here! What brings you out and aboot? Sorry, I had to.
@@JJMcCullough Yes and no on the animals, plants, and minerals. The thing is that "foreign" here doesn't usually include Chinese, and many/most of these terms *are* from Chinese(or via Chinese, at least). Take "Spinach" as one example, usually written ホウレンソウ. This comes from Chinese with several Chinese kanji forms (菠薐草 is one). Or ヒサカキ(柃), a shrub native to Asia used in Shinto rituals. The thing is, a *lot* of these terms have dedicated kanji in Chinese. With modern Japanese's emphasis on the ~2100 post-war "standard use kanji", it's not really feasible to have a dedicated character for every shrub and stone and fish. So the kanji forms survive largely as ornamental trivia, and for whatever reason katakana ended up the preferred form. ナマケモノ is one favorite of mine, the sloth, distinguished as katakana from a lazy person 怠け者). It can be written with the Chinese characters 樹懶, but this is rare in Japanese. In any case, there really is a clear tendency to prefer katakana over hiragana for this class of vocabulary specifically.
You got some things quite wrong. The words you used for fire were ALL borrowed from Chinese, that's why they sounded similar. For example, the NATIVE word for fire in Korean is 불 "Bul". They don't use Hanja for Korean words, only for borrowed Chinese words. About 60% of Korean vocabulary is borrowed from Chinese, and only that (in the modern day) can be written in Hanja, whereas all native Korean words can ONLY be written in Hangeul (for modern usage). And Japanese uses Kanji for both Chinese borrowed words (like the one you said, it is a borrowed word) and for native words. However, there is another twist to this, there IS a history of borrowing Chinese characters for the sound only of the Chinese word, and using it for the native word, which would mean something completely different. While Korea abandoned this use long ago, there are many words in Japanese that were written this way, meaning that the character does not maintain the same meaning in those cases. So the MAIN way which these languages have relation is that they all borrowed words from Chinese into their language. The pronunciation of these words reflect the time and dialect or language of Chinese they were in contact with at the time and that, along with the pronunciation and lack of tones in their language is what causes them to sound different from modern Mandarin (because they mostly were not borrowed from Mandarin nor modern Chinese). Nearly all the native words in Japanese and Korean sound nothing like the Chinese words (like with different consonants, vowels, more syllables, etc). And of course, Japanese and Korean grammar is COMPLETELY different from Chinese, so sentences would be constructed differently (at least in modern usage). Finally, the characters were also changed through history, so, even when using modern Chinese characters (the traditional ones used in Taiwan--the simplified ones in PRC are VERY different), they do not all look the same exactly as the ones that exist in Japanese and Korean.
i love name explain, but this video reminds me of so many of the misconceptions, and the glossing over of Chinese as a monolith definitely didn’t help. glad you could clear that up!
ひ(hi) is actually the native japanese word for fire. the chinese reading would be か(ka)
Name explain’s video concepts are always super interesting, but I can’t help but be bothered by so many misinformations and incorrect facts in all his videos, especially when it comes to Asian languages. It feels disrespectful to have such a lack of thorough research done just to pump out a video.
Seems like linguistics and languages in general is out of his comfort zone.
Not surprised that this channel has inaccuracies...
King Sejong didn't merely *decree* that a new writing system should be made. He was a scholar, and is largely credit as developing the script himself.
This is what i wanted to say
That isn’t know for certain
The character【火】
in Mandarin Chinese: huo
in Japanese: borrowed:か/くゎ(ka/kwa) native:ひ(hi)
in Korean: borrowed:화(hwa) native: 불(bul)
in Vietnamese: borrowed: hỏa native: lửa
The analogy is like there is an inherent Germanic word “fire” in English, however if you need to create a proper noun about fire, you need to use the Latin word “ignis” to create the vocabulary, such as ignition, ignatius…. etc.
This is just my non-academic take but I think that the Sinosphere can be broadly divided into two Sprachbunds (non-genetic groupings of similar languages):
The Sino-Vietnamese sprachbund, with languages such as Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, and Vietnamese all are tonal and analytic languages. Often, Cantonese (spoken in southern china) sounds more like Vietnamese than Mandarin, despite technically being “Chinese”. It just goes to show how close these languages were in proximity.
The Koryo-Japonic sprachbund, made up of Korean, Japanese, and the other minor languages. Due to what was probably close contact in the Korean peninsula before the ancestors of the modern Japanese migrated into the Japanese archipelago, Japanese and Korean share a lot of grammatical features and even have similar sounding particles and basic words. These languages are so similar structurally that entire sentences can be translated one-to-one, which is remarkable, because of how unique many of the features of these languages are.
Sprachbund! That's the word I was looking for! I knew there was a word for it but I'd forgotten what it was.
I might add that in South Korea, most people's second language is Japanese. They explained to me that Japanese has the same structure as Korean.
You're absolutely right! And I'd like to add that these two domains exist not just linguistically but genetically as well. Genetically speaking, Cantonese are very close to Vietnamese, whereas Koreans are very close to Japanese.
Sometimes the grammar structure of Vietnamese and Chinese are identical to each other
“Would you like a glass of wine?”
Chinese:
你/要/一杯/葡萄酒/嗎？
You/Want/A glass/Wine/Final interrogative particle ?
Vietnamese:
伴/𣎏㦖/𠬠瓼/𨢇㘇/空？
Bạn/có muốn/một ly/rượu vang/không?
You/Want/A glass/Wine/Final interrogative particle ?
@@hishamhamed5033 Most people's second language is English. I guarantee you there are more english speakers than Japanese speakers, it's just easier to learn Japanese. English is taught in schools, Japanese is not.
The pronunciation difference of 火 was a bad example cos it actually just represents difference sound shifts these 3 languages went through over the couple thousands of years.
Nowadays Vietnamese mostly uses chữ Quốc Ngữ a script based on Latin script.
As a Chinese who speaks southern dialects, with the provided context and some guessing I can tell that chu Quoc Ngu means character, nation and language literally. The relations between languages are fascinating.
@@12minn7 That is because a lot of Vietnamese official and technical words are borrowings from Chinese. (Much like how modern Western languages have a lot of Latin-based words.)
One thing you didn't mention is that when the Chinese characters were imported, the Chinese pronunciation of a lot of them (or a localized approximation, anyway) was imported too. Japanese has what's called "on-yomi" and "kun-yomi", or "Chinese reading" and "Japanese reading" respectively. The Chinese reading will often be used in multi-character compound words (like "kanji", for instance) and specialized concepts, much the way we in English will use Latin and Greek roots to build new words, like "telephone". Korean is similar, which is why if you speak one language, you can sometimes get the gist of what someone using the other is saying, since they're using the same Old Chinese roots for some of their vocabulary.
Japanese characters sometimes have multiple onyomi because the pronunciation was borrowed multiple times
@@andypham1636 They'll occasionally have more than one kun-yomi too, if the same character was borrowed to represent separate but similar concepts
telephone is derived from Greek meaning "far sound" and in classical Chinese Denwa for telephone means "electric speech". The western languages are heavily influenced by Greek and Latin, the root of western civilisation (Greece and Roman Empire) and the eastern languages heavily influenced by Classical Chinese (Han and Tang Empire). Most modern technical terms that are now used in Chinese and Korean are actually invented by the Japanese by taking root words derived from Classical Chinese (like we use Latin/Greek for being posh).
There are a ton of loanwords in Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese from middle or “classical” Chinese and the pronunciation was “frozen” from when the borrowing occurred.
There are Chinese loanwords in modern Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese that does not sound like modern Mandarin.
0:17 How did all of Thailand get under Water?
Global warming maybe?😂
They are not related but Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese borrowed a lot of Chinese vocabulary plus Japanese and Korean borrowed some vocabulary from each other.
They ARE related. Just look at the map. There were no real borders back then. And they look the same. That means they are related. It is like America is mix of many European origins and China, Korea and Japan are also a mix of many groups. Even Japanese scholar says they are mix of Yaoi people.
@@porytlim8508 I'm sorry, but linguistics and languages don't work like that.
@@porytlim8508most of time, there were mongols between korea and china. so chinease are different group.
Mongol (Original) Manchu Korean and Japanese use the same grammer
Korean and Japanese borrowed words from China
@@porytlim8508 bro I don't think you understand comparative linguistics
Fantastic video. Love learning about new random stuff I was not expecting.
interesting topic ... and I cannot wait to read the comments / this'll be fire!
Actually, in Vietnamese, you can call Chinese characters “Hán tự” as well. Well, does it seems similar to “Hanzi”, “Kanji” and “Hanja”?
As a Vietnamese, I can explain why Vietnamese no longer use Chinese characters. The reason is Vietnamese does not have as many homophones as Chinese and Japanese. Therefore, we can use the Latin script easily and effectively, whereas Chinese and Japanese have to maintain the existence of Chinese characters.
In what sort of situations would you see Chinese characters being used in modern day Vietnam?
@@JJMcCullough Well, very very rare. We just see Chinese characters in historical sites or documents. There are some arguments that these characters should be taught at school, but basically, it has not come true.
@@JJMcCullough Chinese characters are virtually abandoned in the modern writing system of Vietnamese. However, the language is ripe with Chinese-derived and even self-coined Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary. Because Vietnamese people no longer have to learn Chinese characters in school, most of the time they can't tell homophones apart. But as stated in the original comment, homophones are not as problematic for comprehension as in Chinese or Japanese, plus many Sino-Vietnamese words are two-syllabic anyway, so Vietnamese can get away with Chinese characters.
An analogous situation would be runes in the Germanic languages, once used to write Old Norse, but passed along to Anglo-Saxon (Old English) before the adoption of the Latin alphabet. Today only scholars (and some New Age pagans) actually use runes. The best known runes today are the runes for H and B, the initials of the Danish King Harald Bluetooth, superimposed to make the logo of the wireless network protocol named after him. Modern Germanic languages are all written in Latin script, except for a few runic characters added to the Latin alphabet in Icelandic.
@@JJMcCullough rare, only for decoration or for the Hoa Chinese minority.
thanks for not forgetting about Vietnamese at the end
In East Asia in the past, Chinese was a language in the same position as Latin. Just as there are many words derived from Latin in English, there are many words from Chinese in Korean and Japanese, but the three languages are very different languages.
Aha the founding rock so to speak
The thing that U.S & Europeans often forget when comparing East Asian similarities is this: East Asia has been using Chinese ideograms for over 3000 years. Once you start using ideograms, the sound changes completely and it's no longer possible to trace the origin vocabulary by pronunciation.
This makes the Indo-European language model theory of tracing origins completely useless. pronunciation doesn't matter at all in ideographs.
I remember reading somewherar that it is possible to tease out ancient Chinese pronounciations etc. thanks to rhyme dictionaries and poems and such, so it should not be completely impossible to trace sound changes.
I’m not sure what you mean by “once you start using ideograms, the sound changes completely”? The vast majority of Chinese characters are phono-semantic compounds that consist of a sound component and a semantic component. The sound component would indicate the pronunciation (or am approximation of it) of the word at the time the character was created. Of course pronunciations of different words have changed over time with sound changes, but it’s still possible to trace the sound changes. As for Japanese, Korean, etc. they not only borrowed the characters but entire words, including the pronunciation. So it’s absolutely possible to trace them back to the original Chinese. For example the character 日, in Mandarin pronounced /ʐ̩⁵¹/, in Japanese pronounced /nit͡ɕi/ (in the borrowed pronunciation). Baxter reconstructs the Middle Chinese pronunciation as nyit. I think you can see the correspondence even without going into the details. Of course, other loans match too. By the way, there are many varieties of Chinese where the pronunciation of日 preserves features of its earlier pronunciation and thus sounds closer to the Japanese loan pronunciation. For example the Hakka pronunciation is /ŋit̚²/.
@@luckyblockyoshi Kunyomi in Japan is an example of this. In Korea, it's called Idu, which is even older. When Chinese people look at Japanese letters, they can understand it as an image, but not as a spoken language. Korea also had a lot of its own reading 100 years ago, so for Koreans and Japanese, it's just an ideogram and nothing more.
@@UbermanNullist Still unsure what you're referring to here... Kun'yomi and Idu are not comparable. Kun'yomi is a type of reading of Chinese characters, while Idu is a writing system that uses Chinese characters to represent Korean words phonetically. Idu is more comparable to Man'yōgana. Both represent syllables in their respective languages phonetically, for Korean and Japanese people these would be syllabaries not ideograms, and Chinese people cannot understand them.
@@luckyblockyoshi You already understand what I'm talking about. For example, in China, Starbucks is "星巴克 (Xīngbākè)". Burger King is "汉堡王 (Hànbǎowáng)".
When you use ideograms, the phonetic information is gradually lost and harder to trace back to its origin.
What confuses me is that while I do not understand Korean or Japanese at all, I swear I have heard similar words when I watch their media (subtitled), like for example the word for "promise".
A large percentage of words used in Korean and Japanese come from China, so both Korean and Japanese will naturally have overlaps in their uses of words from China. It might be helpful to think of Chinese as the Latin of Korea/Japan/Vietnam--just as Latin words can be found in many European languages that are not mutually intelligible, Chinese words are found in Korean and Japanese, even if they are not mutually intelligible.
China is to the far east what Persian is to Central Asia- as the largest, most powerful culture in the region it exported its culture and language to its neighbors, who at times sent scholars and clergy to China, who dominated their economy and was their source of goods.
@SantomPh I know very little about east Asia's history but was it really comparable to persian? For example for much of history persian was used as a state language from europe to India, but I have never really heard of japan or any other country in East Asia actually using Chinese as a state language
@@ArdaSReal Persian and Chinese are not related, I think @SantomPh was just making an analogy - The way that Chinese influenced Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese is similar to how Persian influenced Armenian, Turkic languages, Hindi/Urdu, local dialects of Arabic, Georgian, and Burushaski
@@AWSMcube i know i just wanted to know how comparable they really are in how spread they were in their regions
My favorite channel, I always get so excited to see new uploads!! Always so informative. Keep up the great work 🎉
Great video!
Such goodness comes out through every video he makes
Korean doesn't use characters when writing. Korean is written in Hangul which is an alphabetic writing system.
oh good, you ended up covering this
Yup he's a real character this guy@@RoccosVideos
My daughter took Japanese as her foreign language in college and one of her classmates had lived in Japan. This classmate said what was being taught would not enable them to converse in Japan even though they were learning all three writing systems. Since she took that course I always wondering if someone spoke Kanji if they could converse with someone on mainland China and now I know.
Kanji is the written script (the so-called "Chinese characters) and does not change the way the word is spoken in Japanese.
Another way to think of it is like writing down one alphabet, and then ask a German, an Icelandic, and an American to say it out loud. More often than not, you would get different sounds from the three languages using the same alphabet.
@Onionion852 yes I understand that but as stated in this video the character for fire has slightly different pronunciations in Japan. So while Kanji is a written system the symbols can have different pronunciations.
no, they wouldn't be able to converse with someone that lives in Chinese. you would need a lingua franca, like how Literary Chinese was used for so many years
no one speaks "Kanji". It is strictly a writing system. While some characters for signs like "entry" and Exit are the same, the two languages do not intersect much when used in full text.
When Sun Yat Sen (the father of modern China) lived in Japan while in exile from the Qing Dynasty he communicated mostly using single character prints when a translator wasn't available.
Taught Japanese is very formal and the ordinary Japanese person speaks the local vernacular as well as age-typical vocabulary.
@@SantomPh Also, depending on location their dialect (mostly only used in not formal situations) can be very different from Standard Japanese (used by everyone for formal situations and some even talks very politely on purpose to hide their own dialect).
Like as you would have huge trouble with Tusgaru-ben and with some of the southern dialects.
Hiragana and Katakana Is kinda like upper and lower case in Latin alphabet, and not exclusivity use for local or foreign words.
Normally, the "grammar indicator" would only be Hiragana, and substantive words (not just noun, but any word with actual meaning) could be Hiragana, Katakana, or Kanji. Formally you'd use Katakana as phonetic notation for Kanji, but normally Hiragana would do it anyway.
AND YOU DO SOMETIMES USE KATAKANA UNNECESSARILY JUST FOR THE HECK OF IT.
Under some video I wrote the same, that the kanas are like the upper/lower case of latin letters instead of different scripts, and I was almost called stupid :D
it seems katakana is used to un-kanji-fy too, as in, you'll never see ゴミ(garbage) or セイ(fault) in their kanji form
@@RelakS__ Because they are not really upper/lower case. lol
In fact it would be better to compare katakana with bold letters instead (when not used for words that anyways would be written in a different character set).
@@tovarishcheleonora8542 Bold, Italics, etc are just writing the same characters in different styles. What I imply is not the usage of the characters, because that is of course different. Even uppercase and lowercase characters are used different in different languages.
However, you can write complete sentences in uppercase and lowercase letters, because they are representing the same voices, like A=a, B=b, etc, and ア=あ, イ=い, etc. BUILDING and building is the same word, right? And that is true to hiragana and katakana as well. タテモノ and たてもの are the same word. You say that katakana puts emphasis on the word? Uppercase do that as well.
Kanji is a different script simply because they represent meaning instead of voices and how you read them can be completely different in different words.
Katakana was often used for routine business documents. It was also used by the military in World War 2, and for telegrams. Postwar it was used for utility accounts as computer systems at the time could not use kanji.
There's this sophomoric "um ackshually" in linguistic videos where they're like: "Japanese is just as related to Korean and Chinese as it is to German or Hungarian, as they are not related at all"
This is very misleading for a introductory video, which this video must be, because it is nowhere close to the quality of the standard youtube linguistics video.
These languages are not "related" in the technical, linguistics scholarship sense of a genealogical relations; that is they are not descended from a known common ancestor. In this technical definition, no matter how many borrowings and loanwords you use, you can never make one language related to another language if they didn't start off genealogically related.
But when normal people use the word "related", they don't only mean the narrow genealogical sense. If you use the colloquial sense of the word "related", then saying Japanese is just as related to Chinese as it is to Hungarian is clearly nonsense. They didn't limit their inter-cultural influence to just the writing system, obviously, and even just through the writing system, a lot of loan words, compound words, pronunciations and abstract concepts were borrowed along as well. You cannot deny that they're more similar to each other than to some random European language, regardless of genealogical technicalities.
That’s what I assumed this video would be all about, seeing the title and length of the video.
5:13 they might be the same for various meanings of “same“. Chinese and Japanese simplified their Chinese characters independently and in two different ways and at two different times. So while simple characters like 火 might be the same, complicated characters are often not.
Also, Chinese simplified characters a lot, while only some characters have been simplified in Japanese
@@andypham1636火 isn't simplified
@@Xeno_fqxb I didn’t mention that character
Kind of barely touched upon but Classical Chinese was the lingua franca of East Asia for 2,000 years. This is how China, Korea, Japan (and Vietnam) communicated with one another. In fact when Commodore Mathew Perry showed up in Edo Bay in 1853 the documents provided to the Japanese were written in Classical Chinese by Chinese scholars and the Japanese responded in kind.
Not that many Vietnamese know how to use Chinese characters. My mom is from the (pre-communist) south and she never learned how to use the. Maybe it is more common in the north where they have more influence from the Chinese and maybe it was taught more throughout the country after the war.
I understand Chinese characters used to be the writing system of Vietnam, but a new writing system was created during the French colonial era. That's why modern Vietnamese is just roman characters with a bunch of accents.
Indeed.
But I think they aren't teaching though, because I heard that you cannot get a government job if you are a recent (i.e. any documentation) descendent of a Chinese national. So despite Saigon having a large portion of Chinese immigrants/Chinese-Vietnamese (Viet Hoa), none of them work in any level of the government (even traffic police).
And I think if the citizens knew how to read Chu Han/Chinese, it'll be the popular characters you would see everywhere, including anime and korean stuff like the fire character.
@@AntTonyLOLKID I didn't know that about government jobs. It's pretty weird since almost everyone in Vietnam has Chinese ancestry from one point in time or another. Vietnam, being so close, has always been heavily influenced by China.
Nom hasn't existed since the 20th century. Vietnamese would only know it if they're Hoa Chinese or learning about it. Also, chu quoc ngu existed long before the French colonial era, but it was enforced then as did the Nguyen emperors
@@andypham1636 But the modern Vietnamese writing system was created by Europeans. I think I read that it was created by Catholic missionaries. I guess I got the timeframe wrong.
@@fattiger6957 yes, Portuguese missionaries
A character like 火 represent a meaning. In theory it could be used as a representation of fire in every country. I wonder if this will happen in the future. That some hanzi will become international. In my local supermarket here in Norway, 小心 = careful, is written on the escalator. With the Norwegian translation underneath 😀
Chinese supermarket?
While there are some parallels between the evolution of biology and the evolution of language, the language equivalent of horizontal gene transfer would (I imagine) be vastly more common. People are going to permanently borrow language from anyone and everyone they come into contact with regularly, often out of pure necessity. Not just when one language has features you need, but just understanding them long enough for trade, diplomacy, let alone working together, means you have added to your personal vocabulary, which means you will take what you learned home.
10:03 that's spelt 'Chữ Hán' which just means 汉字 (Hàn Zì). However this hasn't been used for centuries, instead 'Chữ Nôm' was used. A Chinese script designed specifically for the Vietnamese language. Neither of these are in use anymore, as Chữ Quốc Ngữ (National Script) is now used, this is just the latin characters. The vast majority of Vietnamese these days can't read Chinese characters, and it's not taught in schools anymore.
7:45 hiragana is used for words native to japanese as well as particles, verb conjugations and adjective endings while, katakana is used for foreign words and proper nouns, names of animals and plants (not all), interjections, onomatopoeia and many slang or colloquial words
Ethnically, Koreans and Japanese are related and Altaic Turkic.
Chinese are totally different ethnic groups.
Long ago, Japan adopted kanji and created the phonetic alphabet hiragana and katakana. However, as languages, Chinese and Japanese have different word orders and are fundamentally different.
In modern times, on the contrary, 70 percent of the technical terms in Chinese, such as the sentences for Communist Party, cadre, leadership, socialism, market, and economy, are all Japanese-made vocabulary.
Having different pronounciation for the same characters for different languages also present in the case of the Latin alphabet. The most prominent case is the letter [C].
In many Austronesian languages, the letter [C] is pronounced /tj/ or /ch/
In many Turkic languages, it is /dj/
In West Slavic and some South Slavic languages, it is /ts/
In Welsh, it is straight up /k/
In Somalian, it is similar to Arabic [ع]
They either adopted the letter when the Romans still had only /k/ sound for the letter, or adopted it later during colonial times and changed the sound to reduce redundant sounds (the letter [C] can be replaced by the more consistent [K] and [S]) and avoiding digraphs for some common sounds (example: letter [C] produces its own unique sound but only if it is paired with [H], but again, for some reason it can also be redundant; "cheap" vs "chemistry")
Ouch, that usage of / / and [ ] hurts to read. At least use the proper IPA symbols in them instead of random letters. 💀
Is the current consensus that language families aren't probably all related if you go back far enough? I get that the language families we know are as far back as we can currently reconstruct, but is it believed they are more connected if you go back thousands more years and we just can't figure out how, or is it more believed that different groups of ancient humans developed languages independently from each other somehow and just had proto languages before?
I think the general idea is that language families used to be created and destroyed more often in prehistoric times, since there weren't very many large, centralized cultures and civilizations to perpetuate them like there are now. The language families we see today are just the ones that managed to survive past the agricultural revolution, and were thus set in stone, more or less.
I'm not a linguist, so don't take that as a fact.
Not a linguist, but.
I think it's simply that there isn't any *known* proto-language that is widely accepted here, and that there might be some connections but we of course cannot really make any assumptions in the absence of evidence.
Personally I find Korean grammar quite close to Japanese grammar, which is rather interesting, it almost feels like they could be somewhat related, but this is just a layman speculating. It could also simply be due to cross-pollination, not to mention perhaps effects of the Korean occupation.
I think it is that they are more connected, considering we have reconstructed PIE and other proto languages, languages have to branch off from something originally, but we just don't have enough evidence of it yet
Chinese does have it's own original phonetic script, called Bopomofo or Zhuyin. It's just not used very often compared to Hangeul, Hiragana, and Katakana.
Also, Zhuang (a Kra-Dai language) is another language that historically used Chinese characters, where it was known as Sawndip.
There's a few other languages that occasionally used Chinese characters but never really caught on, like Sanskrit, Mongolian, and the extinct Khitan language, which was related to Mongolian.
Khitan actually had not one but two scripts of it's own that were based on but very distinct from Chinese characters. Tangut, an extinct Sino-Tibetan language (but with a closer relation to Tibetan than Chinese), had a similar story with it's script.
ㄒㄧㄝˋㄒㄧㄝ˙!
I was wondering when someone was gonna mention Bopomofo!
Unlike kanas that are a part of the japanese writing system, bopomofos are generally not considered by chinese as a part of the chinese writing system but a symbol system somewhat like the arabic numerals, hence the name 'Zhuyin Fuhao (phonetic symbols)'. They are used almost exclusively for annotating the pronounciation of the hanzi, besides in some case, writing interjections or onomatopoeia.
@@teamscarletdevil6915Exactly right. 👍
Bopomofo or Zhuyin, and now Pinyin (using Latin characters) are all 20th century inventions.
以下是汉字注音文字：
ㄅㄆㄇㄈㄉㄊㄋㄌㄍㄎㄏㄐㄑㄒㄓㄔㄕㄖ
他们长的就像偏旁部首一样，外国人分不出来
I got two spend a year in Okinawa and two in South Korea. I found that Hangul was so much easier to learn than Japanese. Japanese is not impossible to learn, it’s just for me? Having an alphabet helps a lot
thx 4 that.
If you do do a video on controversial language families, please include Nilo-Saharan.
I think for English speakers the best example of one character having the same meaning but different words in different languages would be numbers. 7 has different words but would be understood across speakers of most European languages.
Good point a symbol assigned the same meaning but with the native "sound"
There is a video by Joshua Rudder of NativLang that talks about Altaic. I could help you with yours, since he left information out.
Iirc sth like this also happened in the Ottoman Empire - they wrote Turkish which Arabic script despite not being related to Arabic since one is Turkic and the other is Semitic before switching to Latin alphabet (there's obviously a religious connotation there, so it's not surprising)
6:58 There is a phonetic writing system called Bopomofo, used primarily for Mandarin, especially Taiwanese Mandarin.
Japanese has two pronunciations for kanji, one that's native Japanese, and one that's borrowed from Chinese. The borrowed pronunciation for fire is "ka." Also, they have kanji that don't exist in Chinese. And some meanings, though perhaps derived from Chinese, aren't the most common. For example, there is a kanji in Japanese for "like" is usually used in Chinese for other (somewhat related) words, and a different hanzi is used for "like."
I recently discovered that Chinese has some hanzi with more than one pronunciation as well.
Actually 3 reading types for Japanese. Because there is "name reading" (nanori) as well.
That's true; there are many native Japanese kanji that were invented in Japan and do not exist in Chinese. There are similar characters that only exist in Vietnamese.
The Latin alphabet doesn’t have 26 characters, it has 52, because capitals and lowercase are not the same characters (even if most are incredibly similar). This is similar to how hiragana and katakana use different characters for the same sounds
Except that the rules for when to use hiragana or katakana are completely different from the rules for upper case and lower case.
@@MrQuantumInc not always. Katakana can be used for emphasis, similar to how all caps are used. But generally yes, hiragana and katakana are not used for the same functions as caps and lowercase are. But my point was about more about how people who use the latin alphabet often forget that for nonnative learners it’s more complicated than they think. Still not as many characters as hiragana and katakana (and then kanji), but not as quite as simple as “only 26 to learn, so easy!”
No. Latin script has even more than 52. If we count every modification of it that any latin alphabet using languages has (and their capital forms of course).
That "26" is just the english alphabet.
And even if you know a latin script alphabet you will have to relearn it for every language that uses it.
That's quite the specious argument.
The real Latin alphabet had 21 characters. Only 21 as lowercase did not exist.
Later on, the Latin alphabet had 23 because it added Y and Z to accommodate Greek loanwords. Lowercase still did not exist.
The English version of the Latin Alphabet has 26 characters. Whether they can be considered 52 is debatable.
@@idraoteespecially since a lot of people in personal writing use upper and lower interchangeably.
And trying to claim there are 52 characters? Well, each lower and upper case has a cursive version....so, would we say the English alphabet has 104 characters!?
Or how about how very different each computer font is? Most letters have serrifs, but there is the sans serrif font...and the Gothic font.
So english has 1000s and 1000s of characters?
That's silly.
What's Chinese Japanese? One of those peninsular Japonic languages?
(there's a mildly puzzling missing comma in the title lol)
There's also a typo on the graphic with the names of the characters. Japanese is misspelled, "Japnanese".
You could've made a comparison to English having a majority of its vocabulary from the romance languages (mainly French and Latin) while actually being a Germanic language. It sounds like the languages discussed in the video are all in separate language groups but have a lot of vocabulary borrowed from Chinese, one of the languages being discussed. This would've made the video more relatable especially because the video was made in English.
Some words though (not generally accepted as Sinitic words) are related. For example bear, Japanese "kuma" compared with Korean "gom" and Mandarin "xiong" meaning bear. Some other examples such as Korean "garam" and Mandarin "jiang" meaning river, and Korean "baram" and Mandarin "feng" meaning wind.
For Vietnamese, similar things happen too. Such as Vietnamese “tieng” meaning language and Mandarin "sheng" meaning sound (the Sino-Vietnamese version is "thanh"). So though these languages are not generally considered related, I think it is because the in-depth similarities are hard to trace. But there are still a few traces.
You sound like Lola from this series Big Mouth on Netflix! hahaha! Also, learned a lot from this video. So, thanks. :)
Aren't there a basic subset of Chinese characters that have memorable mnemonic references?
I knew a Vietnamese that said that the Vietnamese language derived from Cantonese. Is that true?
Not true. Vietnamese is Austroasiatic while Cantonese is Sinitic. However, vietnamese language have been influenced by southern Sinitic/Chinese languages like Cantonese in term of vocabulary. They also used Chinese characters to write for over 1000 years up till 1920s.
There is a Chinese phonetic script that looks like katakana.
I don’t know the English name, in Chinese it sounds like
Ber Per Mer Fer
It's interesting that they're not considered related. There are a good number of words that sound common between Chinese, Japanese and Korean... though, sometimes not "standard" Chinese, but Cantonese or other dialects.
Since this vid is about language: Why do you almost always add "uh" to the end of the last word of a sentence?
I think you mispronounced Jeju as Teju for some reason. It's just a J sound at the beginning, like how it's spelled.
The fact that you say Japanese and Korean took the symbols from Chinese and applied them to their already existing sounds is partially wrong.
The symbol for fire that you mention is pronounced extremely similarly in all three languages because both Japanese and Korean have Sino-Japanese and Sino-Korean readings for those symbols (localized pronunciation of the original chinese sound “huǒ” - 'ka' for Japanese and 'hwa' for Korean).
While if you write the symbol for fire in Japanese, it can be read as ‘hi’ or ‘ka’ (derived from the Chinese pronunciation) if part of a compound word like ‘volcano’ (‘ka-zan,’ where ‘-zan’ is actually ‘san’ from ‘Fuji-san,’ where ‘san’ is the Sino-Japanese pronunciation of the word mountain and which is pronounced ‘yama’ as a pure Japanese word).
(And note that ‘-san’ is not the same as the title suffix, as in last name + ‘san.’)
The grammar for Japanese and Korean is extremely similar but very different from Chinese. So saying that Korean and Japanese are related is more than logical, and the proof is in the linguistic pudding. I could go on but I'll stop here because it's getting too long. PS source I am a double major in Japanese and Korean, and an intermediate speaker of Chinese.
Actually, native Japanese pronunciation is "hi" for fire. "ka" is borrowed from Chinese (likely not the mandarin one).
I feel like leaving out Manchuric in this video and in the comments critiqueing it is a big blind spot for comprehending this
😂 why not a hybrid language like machuneese
Their writing system is Logographs, is that same as Egyptian Hieroglyphs ?? I think those 10,000 logographs in China is their 10,000 words. So they dont have alphabets system ?? That’s kinda strange, coz most in Asia nations have alphabets systems like in Latin script. From Hebrew, Arabia to Persia, even the Abugida writing system common to Brahmic script family of Tibet, South Asia and Southeast Asia nations.
Actually, Im guessing that Japanese - Kanji, and Korean - Hanja might be relatively new or heavily borrowed from Chinese system when its quite obvious China would be their biggest Economic partner in ancient times.
But I think Korea & Japan should have an ancient alphabet system they have forgotten, due to disruptions like Mongolia Empire invasion & expansion in their territories, coz their ancient neighbor in Manchuria region have a language & alphabet system same as Abugida script system of Southeast Asia. North Korea’s Dictator Kim ancestor were said to be of Manchus. This same people the Manchus is the foundation of the last Qing Dynasty of China. I think the Manchus never impose their language & culture to China during their power, they just adapted to the majority Chinese culture & way of life.
That-ah was a good-ah video-ah.😁
There is an interesting Japanese channel called minerva scientia. This channel goes through a lot of linguistic theory on Japanese and it's connections to proto Korean, Ainu, Ryukyu languages, but also has recordings of the different dialects as well as bizarre jokes or "what-ifs..." It's not.in English, but I really recommend a look see thru
Chinese did not even have a method of recording pronunciations before adopting the Roman alphabet in 1960s, and thats just for Mandarin, a language made in 1600s.
Why would they need a pronunciation recording for fruit
Unless there's a Ancient Chinese Eminem going around saying oranges mandarins hinges peach pear plums
Hi in Japanese is known as the onyomi, or Sino-Japanese pronunciation of the fire character. The kunyomi, or native Japanese pronunciation of it, is Ka.
No. "hi" is the native, and "ka" is the chinese borrowing. You mixed the two things up.
@@tovarishcheleonora8542 ah, I may have. Non-native Japanese speaker.
But then why is Hi closer to the Chinese pronunciation?
The other way around
On: ka (kwa in the old orthography)
Kun: hi
は行 (modern day h-) was p- in old Japanese, so it wasn't that similar to the Chinese pronunciation
@@TheInvisibleCanadia When japanese initially adopted the kanji, the ha-gyou had the consonant pronounced as 'p', and the kun'yomi 'pi' is nothing like the chinese pronounciation of 'hwa'. Modern japanese has went through the 'ha-gyou sound change' and the ha-gyou consonent changed from 'p (bilabial plosive)' to 'h (glottal fricative)' and is pretty close to the mandarin 'h (velar fricative)'.
The on'yomi on the other hand, because the japanese at time lacked the similar consonant for the chinese 'h(曉, voiceless velar fricative)', kanji with such consonant usually went to 'ka-gyou(voiceless velar plosive)'. Thus the the on'yomi of 火 is likely 'kuwa' , based on the middle chinese 'hwa', and later changed to 'ka'. (a lot of kanji that start with h in mandarin have the on'yomi start with k)
The emergence of the glottal fricative h occured roughly during 17th century, and its too late and not neccessary to update existing on'yomi to match the chinese.
Vietnamese people used to use kanji as well... Such as Korean also used to decades ago
it is better to call it the Chinese characters if you aren't adressing Japanese since kanji is the Japanese pronunciation of Chinese character.
5:15 and all three words have the same ethymological origin.
7:02 I believe it was during the 20th century, perhaps late 19th century, when they developed pinyin, which is a phonetic alphabet for Chinese.... that they seldomly use.
10:34 at some point, every language spoken near China by a citybuilding civilization has used those characters; some languages (most of them dead now, and Chinese did it at least once) tried to make their own writing systems separate from that, while some others changed to sanskrit script after converting to Buddhism.
I heard some tribes of japan is related to eastern tibetans
I'm surprised, as while learning Korean and Japanese I saw a lot of helpful parallels in grammar. But maybe the similarities are only visible because both are so different than Indo-European solutions?
Korean and Japanese has similar grammar structure, so this allows for both language to translate each others language from word to word.
Whilst grammar of Mandarin Chinese is a lot more similar english than it is to Korean/Japanese.
Randomly learned about the Altaic language family theory after watching a Turkish TV show and thinking that it sounded eerily like Japanese.
I'm not a linguist but I think Japanese and Korean may be related, because their grammars are very similar - yes, they do differ, eg adjectives work a little differently, but the logics of both languages are really alike, at least that's what it seems. Hence I think they might be related, but they just separated a very long time ago, before any written form of those languages emerged.
But that's my theory as a learner of both languages.
May be true, may not be true. After all a similar logic of two languages is common between those related ones. European language's grammars differ a lot, but they still follow a similar logic, especially when it comes to languages from a single family, like Romanic.
It's not that I wanna play smart, it's just that I'm really for the theory that the Altaic group is real hah
Edit: woah, I see I started a discussion. Quite some interesting data, thanks! And don't be rude :(
You could add in that they tried to invade each other hundreds of times. A lot of people thought English was a Romance language, wanted it to be one so they added in all neo-latin words and changed old spellings. Being in a cultural sphere of influence doesn’t make them related.
The Japanese and Korean languages are very similar in grammar, but they do not share a significant amount of cognate words in their basic vocabulary like Indo-European languages do. So, It is still debated whether or not they are related languages, and most linguists consider them as a Sprachbund, a group of languages that share areal features resulting from geographical proximity and language contact, at this point.
in the pre-Heian era the Japanese imported several Chinese cultural elements including Chinese writing, Buddhism and even the famous tea ceremony of the Tang Dynasty. This influence declined during and after the Heian era
(794 to 1185 ) but plenty of bits of pieces remain even to this day.
Similarly in Korea , China was at times their vassal lord or their top economic partner so Chinese influence would not be a shocker. Top Korean scholars would certainly be taught Chinese style scholarship as would Buddhist monks. However geographical separation and Korea's peninsular nature meant that they kept their culture, language and identity more than their neighbors did (the Min, for example were absorbed into China). Hanja is mostly now used only for old grave stones and historical sites as Hangul is simply that easier to use. Borrowed words exist, but Koreans typically only understand them as Korean and cannot relate them to Chinese concepts
@@gambitacio Actually, "trying to invade each other" not really influences any language.
And English has mor than 60% latin/french words because historically England had kings and high ranking people like as nobles from Normandy, which is in France (and at that time was in England's hands).
@@mokuseinoosa "like Indo-European languages do" 🤣 Are you really trust in that? I mean, why would you trust in a language family theory that had to literally invent the "h1 h2 h3" just so they can make up more cognates by sticking them in randomly into words?
And a language on sulawesi(celebes),indonesia using hangul as their written form despite they dont have any historical connection at all
Why is Thailand underwater? 😅
What happened to thailand in ur map
It must have been thaiken out
I wouldn't say that Hanzi are called different things in Japanese and Korean. Are tomato's are called something else in Spanish because they pronounce it differently. Sure Kanji and Hanja look and sound very different than Hanzi, but this mostly because we transcribed it from three fairly different languages into English. Further it's not like these transcriptions are unique, Hanzi could be transcribed as Hantzu using the older Wade Giles systems.
Actually, yeah all the three pronounces it differently and it's not "just the transcription is different".
@@tovarishcheleonora8542 of course they pronounce it differently that was my exact point. They pronounce it differently because they are transcribing the Chinese word Hanzi( pronounced in whatever dialect of Chinese they were exposed to) to Japanese and Korean for Kanji and Hanja respectively. Then we further transcribed the three words into English using multiple different transcriptions over a thousand years after the words had been adopted by Japanese and Korean, so of course they look and sound a bit different, but they're all etymologically speaking the same word. I know this because in Japanese in particular, most Kanji have at least two reading On and Kun, a Chinese reading and Japanese reading. Kanji is On reading of the characters which means it's a word they borrowed from Chinese, but Japanese as 108 syllables no tones and Chinese has over 400 syllables and 4 tones, and over the course 1000 year pronunciation shifts.
9:00 Its a bit funny tho... How can you keep saying hangul in 4-5 different ways xDDD I mean.. Its kinda impressive rly :P
Patrick do an altaic vid plz
I'm kind of impressed that the Chinese were such a completely dominant cultural force in the region that they got their writing system adopted by speakers of three unrelated languages.
China was the heart of trade and culture, it's not surprising their neighbors adopted it
Well... of all alphabet sounds used in family names chinese and koreans use the letter N in more names than any other letter of the alphabet. But so do the Irish. It means they share an ancient origin.
4:07 It’s pronounced as (tsang-jee-yeh), your pronounciation caught me off guard 😅
in Taiwan there's 注音 or zhuyin or bopomofo, all the same name for a unique writing system that taiwanese people use to transliterate Chinese characters. It always reminded me a little of hiragana in the Japanese script
Can you do something similar with Bahasa Melayu and Bahasa Indonesia?!
Fyi; currently the netizen of these two are bickering about everything and anything that’s got to do each other. Including language. At the moment the issue of claimant of origin of food, culture and what not has been a hotly discussed among them, well mostly Indonesian, as they are more populated than Malaysia.
Indonesia is a huge country that comprises many dialects and race. Malaysia, the ‘little’ brother is much smaller. The reason I wrote little brother, is because these nations share more similarity rather than differences, through its history and locality. But due to geopolitical and nation pride and whatnot, I sense the bickering has gone a little over than just a friendly banter, if I may say so.
So it’ll be nice to have an outsider, on a neutral ground to lay rest some basic history, of language origin and the current situation. Bahasa Indonesia have been recognise at UNESCO for their language. This has led them to stamp down the Malay language; even though Malay language is the root of Indonesian language.
I’m sure, after putting up…there will be tonnes of comments coming from Indonesia come flooding in. As long as it’s M vs I…they bite and bicker…but in truth we are like brother and cousins to one another in terms of culture, traditions and religion.
Vietnamese is much more close to Chinese than Korean and Japanese.
Those languages are actually related.
Austroasiatic as in Austria? Probably not, but where does the name come from?
Probably Australia !
'australis' is a Latin word for 'southern' (like in borea australis), hence 'Australia' and 'Austroasiatic', 'Austronesian' etc. 'Austria' is a Latinization of German 'Österreich' (rather the Old German form of it, not the modern German word). Etymologically, it has nothing to do with the Latin word , but while creating the Latin form of the German word the monks maybe thought of Ostarrichia (or so) being in the south of the German-speaking world while looking an appropriate Latin vowel for the initial 'O' and that gave it a twist.
If you draw a line in those characters slightly wrong are you saying a totally different word?
you might make a character that doesn't exist. That's why brush strokes are numbered so you write the characters in the right order
thank you @@SantomPh
Depends on which character, honestly. And in which language. Because there are a few pairs that only different in 1 or 2 strokes being slightly different from each other. But that's only a very few.
cool, thanks, I was talking about chinese because it looks like the most dificult to learn @@tovarishcheleonora8542
Chinese generally only refers to the writing system..never the pronunciation, before China was unified. The Dynasties are well aware of different dialects, but instead of putting maximum requirements of what’s Chinese..instead they aim for minimal requirements because they need to unite the people.
No mention of traditional vs simplified Chinese?
Yes, any other answer is the cultural copium of people not wanting to admit to or wanting to downplay any external influence to their language and or culture.
Character meanings can and did change. E.g. for I (me) Japanese uses the 私 character, while Chinese uses the 我 character. While both basically means the same, there are some differences in what kind of pronoun they are. I don't remember exactly, but may be politeness or something. Like there are a couple of other "I" in japanese, and you can't use arbitrarily any of them e.g. when you talk to your boss.
Good point. 我 is used in Japanese, too, like 我ら/我々 (ware-ra/wareware meaning "we"), though they sound very formal. 我 (ware meaning "I") is very old-fashioned, and you only see it in old novels.
"I" in Japanese has rather many ways to say, depending on situations relationships, and eras. (For example, 私 わたくし あたし 僕 俺 わし 当方 自分 みども 拙者 etc.)
Chinese was indeed a hard language to learn back in the days.
But it's kinda awkward now when nearly all Chinese including many Malaysians and Singaporians read and speak Chinese with no problem at all.
Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese have Chinese root words similarly to how English has Latin and French root words, even though the majority of English words are derived from Italic languages, the core vocabulary is still Germanic. Likewise, the core vocabulary of the East Asian languages is not Sino-Tibetan.
I remember I Japanese class, we had to learn both the Japanese word for each Kanji, but also the Chinese one.
Because there are two types of reading for them. Not "japanese word and chinese word" but native Japanese reading and borrowed Chinese reading.
😮@@tovarishcheleonora8542
The same view is applicable to various "dialects" spoken in China? The "dialects" dont have writing system either.
Ok 🤦♂️. Chinese characters actually have quite a lot to do with phonology and it's impossible to properly understand them without understanding their phonological aspect. The languages that borrowed them, like Vietnamese, Korean and Chinese, pretty much swallowed the Chinese language whole, partly because of the importance of the phonological values of the characters to their use. Also, it's been credibly proposed that Korean and Japanese are related.
Get a bunch of Korean, Chinese, and Japanese people together and ask them if you want to see an argument
Funny story, the story of how Japan got it's endonym actually ties to the adoption of Kanji, the then emperor of Japan learned them, and then used them to write a letter saying hello to the emperor of China, in which he calls Japan the land where the sun rises, which is what Nippon translates to in english, sunrise!
I learned Hangul in Korea very quickly- I could pronounce anything but didn’t know what most of it meant.
15th century? Wow!
If they share the same surnames, they are likely related. Many Han Chinese and Koreans are having same surnames, they may related in the past. These days many people speak English, it doesn't mean they are all Anglo Saxon.
The three countries are actually powerful enemies of each other.
Finally someone said it 🫡👍🏽
4:05 - "Cangjie"
5:04 - "Kanji"
Coincidence? I mean, probably. But it's a pretty cool coincidence imo.
no, he messed up the pronounciation of canjie. they sound different
Cang Jie is tsʰaŋ tɕje
“kanji” is loaned from “hanzi”.