Ganelon wrote:
Yomi pronunciations only sound similar to Chinese pronunciations as I mentioned. By not taking the pronunciations, I meant that whereas the Japanese took the exact characters from traditional Chinese for writing, they did not take the exact Chinese pronunciations for speech.
How and why would the Japanese take Chinese characters without taking the pronunciations? Think about it. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And why would the on-yomis (which means "chinese reading" in Japanese!) mysteriously sound similar to the respective native Chinese pronunciations unless they borrowed the pronunciations from Chinese? Do you have an alternate explanation for the on- readings of the Japanese characters being so close to the Chinese characters? If you look at the characters, and see the Chinese readings and the Japanese 'on-yomi', you see regular sound correspondences which can only be due to borrowing the spoken pronunciations.
Well, it is true that many "Chinese" readings in Japanese are via Korea. The Koreans used Chinese characters before the Japanese, and "Koreanized" the Chinese pronunciations of many characters. The Japanese then borrowed these slightly skewed Chinese pronunciations when they borrowed the characters through Korea. However, many characters were borrowed directly from China. Many Japanese were sent to study Chinese in China, and bring back that knowledge to Japan, which contributed to more and more Chinese words entering into Japanese.
One of the most striking results of the heavy borrowing of Chinese into Japanese is that Japanese borrowed the Chinese numeral system (the pronunciations and all-- compare Mandarin Chinese san 'three' and Japanese san 'three'. The old Chinese reading was actually 'sam', not 'san', but both Mandarin Chinese and Japanese had later, independent sound changes of syllable-final m>n, which obfuscates this fact. However, the old Chinese reading is retained in some Japanese words, for example "
samisen", which literally means "
three strings" . This is the name of a traditional musical instrument in Japan. In addition some other Chinese languages retain the original reading "sam"). This is very, very rare among the world's languages. Numeral systems are usually pretty stable (English, for example, has about as many French loan words as Japanese has Chinese loanwords, but English didn't borrow French's numerals!!).
While a member of one nationality will be able to read the other's kanji/Chinese clearly (with the exception of minor variations for some definitons), a Japanese person will not understand verbal Chinese and vice versa.
This is true (though you overexaggerate the ability of Chinese to read Japanese and vice versa--there is far more variation with the characters among the two languages than you may think). But this is because Japanese borrowed from Chinese a thousand years ago and languages change over time. This does not negate the fact the Japanese borrowed Chinese pronunciations for Chinese characters (this is a fact which is universally accepted due to the overwhelming and unrefutable evidence--not only linguistic but also historical, archaeological, and anthropological). Think about English and French. Like I said over half the English lexicon is composed of French words. Can English people understand French people today? Nope. Why are there all these French words in English? Due to past contacts between French and English people in which English borrowed heavily from French (due primarily to the Normandy conquest of England and the Norman rule over the English).
A language does not borrow half of its vocabulary from another language unless the two languages are heavily in contact for a long period of time. Sometimes this is due to occupation/war (as with English), other times due to cultural diffusion (as with Japanese), other times just due to close geographical proximity and long-term relations (for example, trade relations).
) by reading and saving all those images you put up.
