Quote:
Originally Posted by trunker
and to that poster on the first page,.... how is japanese not linguistically related to chinese?
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They're two different ~types~ of language? I think Japanese is a "conglutinate" (sp?) language, IE words can change their meaning by what you 'glue' on the end so 'taberu'- to eat, can become 'tabe-na-katta' To eat not past tense or rather, i didn't eat. Then chinese is a concrete or fixed language? words don't change, rather you add words or change their position in a sentence to change meaning. It's also tonal. Basically, they are totally different, and no one is exactly sure where on earth Japanese language developed from, because it definitely didn't come from China. It's more closely related to southern asian languages. The kanji confuses the issue as it makes it ~seem~ very chinese, but that's like looking at a mouse and an elephant and going 'Yep! they're related, you can tell cause they both got four legs!'.
But Japanese does have a lot of chinese loan words , roughly I suppose, in the same way English has a lot of french loan words. It's not created the language, but it's added an interesting garnish.