Quote:
Originally Posted by kireikoori
Hmm...Ga Ho actually sounds a little bit similar to Kago. But Jia Hu sounds nothing like Kago. Unsurprising, consider neither Japanese or Korean are Sino-Tibetan languages.
Anyway, that's a lot for the help. Much obliged.  |
you are more than welcome.
maybe you misunderstood what i said... in the case of Kago i said the chinese has similarities to the korean sound and the korean sound has similarities to the japanese sound. doesn't mean the chinese and japanese are so similar.
also i think you are getting off on the wrong point about sino-tibetan languages etc. you need to understand that japanese has a lot of chinese pronunciation in it's language.. hence the 音読み (chinese reading) gramatically it is not similar to sino-tibetan languages, that is correct, but in pronunciation many words are similar.
Japanese: 進歩 - しんぽ - shin po
Chinese : 進歩 - jin bu
Japanese: 心理 - しんり - shin ri
Chinese: 心理 - xin li (xin is pronounced shin, and the japanese り sounds very similar to a li in chinese because it the japanese way of pronouncing R sounds)
Japanese: 地理 - ちり - chi ri
Chinese: 地理 - ji li
there are just a couple of examples, similar aren't they? so the fact that GRAMMATICALLY japanese is a completely different language it still has a lot of very similar sounding words to chinese.
this is due to the fact that Japanese had no written system and with early tradings with China documents were all written in Chinese and were read as such. during the Tang Dynasty it was becoming more common for japanese to be written with chinese characters and the chinese pronunciation for words became part of the language.. this is something called Language Transfer, look it up, it is interesting. commonly you can think of it like Chinglish, Singlish (mixing languages, accents etc together) this happened with Japanese.
as a general rule (but not always true) words combining two or more 漢字 (kanji) are pronounced with the 音読み (chinese reading) although the sounds have become more Japanese sounding over time.. think of it like when japanese take english words into their language. you can compare this to English, the influence of the French language during french occupation of England has had a profound impact on our vocabulary but we don't pronounce those words exactly like the french do, we have adapted them to our language.
so to me im more surprised that this word doesn't sound more like chinese. but then again the chinese interacting with japan back then were probably using a language that sounds quite different from modern 普通话（mandarin) just as the english from 1500 year ago was a completely different sounding language to today.