Comments on: Fortune Cookies: More Japanese Than You Think

By: imjinah

imjinah — Sat, 24 Aug 2013 21:44:00 +0000

Spoken language does not always have any correlation to the origins of the orthography/written form.

By: imjinah

imjinah — Sat, 24 Aug 2013 21:42:00 +0000

I almost liked this article if it weren’t for that “Japan has China to thank for the Japanese language” part. Sorry, but it sounds as if Japanese directly evolved FROM Chinese, which is NOT.

By: imjinah

imjinah — Sat, 24 Aug 2013 21:40:00 +0000

Though I agree with you that you cannot fully say the Japanese language “owes” that much to Chinese (Mandarin), the whole Altaic myth has long been debunked by linguists even before information on this asserting that Japanese is related with the likes of Mongolian, Turkish, Manchu, Korean and Kazakh have ever reach us through the internet.

By: KOH+

KOH+ — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 00:44:00 +0000

hmmm i totally agree with you on this one :)
Japan also has a long history of suppressing indigenous people (i.e. Ainu) living in the country and assimilate them. So the “homogeneous society” is pretty much just an illusion.

By: ChristFighter

ChristFighter — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 01:45:00 +0000

Mainly because, when you’re foreign in Japan, you hear a lot about how Japanese Japan is and how foreign everything else is. How unique and different they are from each other.

Japan is a melting pot. Always has been. On top of that, they aren’t and never have been homogenous, as they have an insane variety of dialects in their own language, multiple native ethnicities, and something like ten or more separate indigenous languages. Obviously, I don’t think this is bad – I think this is wonderful and beautiful. Strangely, Japanese people also use their misconceptions about their homogeneity to insist that they are inferior – I can’t TELL you how many times people tell me, “I’m Japanese, so I can’t POSSIBLY understand that foreign thing.” So as a teacher and parent, it is VERY important to me to dispel that misconception as much as I can (I HATE when my kids try to pull that on me.)

So the origins of words are important, because some of it flies in the face of what people commonly believe. I like facts. I think it’s beautiful. Sometimes it’s my job.

By: KOH+

KOH+ — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 20:30:00 +0000

Actually Japanese pronunciation is similar to Ancient Chinese pronunciation, certainly not something like “bad” pronunciation there lol.

And almost half of modern Chinese vocab sourced from Japanese words in the early 20th Century. So I guess that’s a tie up there.

But seriously why care where the origin is from?