The origins of Japanese words
 

I named this words instead of language, I'll make a topic for Japonic language classification later.

Japanese language classification has something to do with this topic, but this topic is more specific.

For now, the question in on the word Kago.
かご(kago) has several meanings in Japanese.
From wikitionary:
1. 篭, 籠: basket, cage
2. 駕篭, 駕籠: palanquin
3. 加護: divine protection
4. 過誤: fault, mistake
5. 訛語: nonstandard pronunciation

All right, these Kanji were taken from China to represent what was already in the Japanese tongue, taking the kanji equivalents to what their words meant and applying the kanji that meant the same thing to them. Meaning that Japanese and Chinese are related through writing system both not necessarily through tongue. In fact according to linguists it's highly unlikely that Japanese spoken language and Chinese spoken language are in any way related.

So what is likely?
Apparently Siberian/Korea/Altaic is the most.
That Japanese is some sort of Altaic language and Korean is as well.

All right, but that's not the point of this here topic. The thing is I'm looking to see where outside of Japan the word Kago might come from and exist. Yes it's Japanese but all languages come from somewhere. Kago certainly isn't a Chinese word(no surprise there), it doesn't sound very Korean either. I put the word Kago in google and mostly find Japanese links. Not much with google finding anything non-Japanese in origin of the word.

Even if you can't find me a non-Japanese origin of the word, I would like to know more background on it. For now, this is the Japanese word I'm most interested in, I may ask more later though.

Help please?

Kago Ai (Ai Kago - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) has the kanji 加護 and if you say this in korean it is like "ga ho" so a little similar. in chinese it is "jia hu" which has more similarity in sound to korean. so it is like chinese <-> korean <-> japanese in terms of how they sound together.

加護 is in fact made up of the 音読み (onyomi - ON) chinese origin sound/reading for these characters. the 訓読み (kunyomi - KUN) japanese origin reading/sound are the other type of reading. for those two characters, according to the dictionary are:
加 ON = か (ka) KUN = 加える (kuwaeru), 加わる (kuwawaru) English - add; addition; increase; join; include; Canada
護 ON = ご (go) KUN = まもる (mamoru) English - safeguard; protect




that is about all the help i can give.

first of all someone from japan is not called 日本語 "nihongo/nippongo", that is the name of their language. they are called 日本人 "nihonjin/nipponjin"

a quick search in google resulted in this:

1577, via Port. Japao, Du. Japan, acquired in Malacca from Malay Japang, from Chinese jih pun "sunrise" (equivalent of Japanese Nippon), from jih "sun" + pun "origin." Earliest form in Europe was Marco Polo's Chipangu. Colloquial abbreviation Jap is from 1880, not originally pejorative but became so during World War II. Cultural contact led to japaning "coat with laquer or varnish" (1688), along with japonaiserie (1896, from Fr.), japonica (1819, from variant Japon), etc. Japanese beetle attested from 1919, accidentally introduced in U.S. 1916 in larval stage in a shipment of Japanese iris. Japlish "Japanese with many Eng. words" is from 1960.

many countries are not known by the same we give them in english in their own language. for example we can look at one of Japan's neighbours.

China: is known as 中国 "zhong guo" which you could pronounce perhaps "jong gwor"... haha ok hopefully you read that similar to the real sound. but we call it China. It is believed to come from the first dynasty to unite china, which was the Qin Dynasty. which is pronounced like "Chin" and in latin they wrote it is Sina.. so i think you can see how the word china could evolve from that.

also you should be aware that many other countries don't call America, Australia, England etc by their english name, they call it by another name in their own language. for example:
America:
Chinese - 美国 - "mei guo" sounds like "may gwor" which you could read as beautiful country.
Japanese - while the Japanese commonly call america アメリカ "amerika" (sounds the same as english because it is borrowed from english) they also call it 米国 "beikoku"
Australia
Japanese - オーストラリア "oosutoraria" sounds similar to English but they also call it 豪州 "goushuu" although this is not a commonly used term at all.

there are many more examples but i won't go on.

Hmm...Ga Ho actually sounds a little bit similar to Kago. But Jia Hu sounds nothing like Kago. Unsurprising, considering neither Japanese or Korean are Sino-Tibetan languages.

Anyway, thanks 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.

Here's my Japanese mini-tip of the day.

"go" or "語" translates to 'language' or 'word'. Therefor, nihongo/日本語 is Japanese. Furansugo/フランス語 is French. Doitsugo (from Deutsch)/ドイツ語　is German.

"jin" or "人" translates to 'people'. Nihonjin/日本人 is Japanese people. Kanadajin/カナダ人　is Canadian people, and so on.

It is rather strange that we choose not to use the native word Nihon for Japan, but that tends to happen to many location names across the world. In Germany, we call one of their cities Munich, but in Germany, its called Munchen. This type of thing occurs with many country and city names across the world. Conversely, Japanese use the Portuguese spelling for their version of England, which is igirisu/イギリス, despite the fact that England speaks English (obviously..). It derives from Portuguese "Ingles". This is most likely due to the fact that Portugal was one of the first western nations to make contact and trade with Japan.

which of course is due to the early portuguese intraction with Japan, which was quite significant.

So you're saying that in the process of Japan adopting the Chinese writing system, they also incorporated a lot of Chinese words into their language as well, not just the writing system?

Makes sense. Though surely less than half of Japanese words are Chinese in origin.

So then you think the word Kago indeed comes from the Chinese Jia hu then, that the word itself is Chinese in origin and not just the Kanji? Instead of say...Siberian in origin. Sorry if I'm still confusing what you meant by your words.

Jia Hu sound very different from both Ga Ho and Kago. Then again I'm more used to interpreting pronunciation the Japan way when I look at romaji. As in when I look at Jia Hu I see ジアフ. Which is probably far from how they pronounce it in Chinese. Still, I can't see how Jiahu could be in any pronounced similar to Kago. If Kago has roots in the word Jiahu it must have REALLY changed over the years.

to be honest i have no idea about that word itself. you would need to find a scholar for that.. haha. you are correct about the pronunciation except the the hu is a stronger 'h' sound in chinese than the hu/fu sound of japanese. this is not taking into account tone in chinese.

i would imagine it was taken from the chinese language origanally as it uses the 音読み (chinese reading) it has just evolved over time to sound quite different to chinese. as i mentioned in the earlier post we need to remember there are many dialects in china the sound quite different and in 1500 years languages evolve a lot to sound very different. chinese and japanese have both changed a lot from when this word would have been introduced.

the reason for my lengthy post was that i didn't want you to write off chinese as being the origin of the word simply because it comes from a different language group. English is a west germanic langauge and french is a romance language but french influence is huge. as i said if you are interested look into language transfer and language contact.

i just checked with my friend who happens to be a Japanese teacher and she agrees with me that most words in Japanese made up for 2 漢字 or more are read using the 音読み (chinese reading). which if you look in a dictionary, in papers etc, it is a hell of a lot of words. as i said it is about language transfer/contact so the sounds will change over time to even sound quite different. i would not be surprised if well over 50% of the words have chinese origins.

i remember watching a documentary on the english language and scholars have so much text that they cannot work out because the language has changed to much it is unrecognisable.

　　It's written on my high school text book that Japanese is the descendent of people of Qin dynasty who immigrated to it. だから、沢山の漢字を保たれたと思う。それに、あの時 、漢字の発音は今と違う。日本語の漢字は古い発音かも しれない。漢字の意味は中国の古語のと大体同じです。 （P.S僕は中国人です、何か違うなら、教えて下さい。下 手な日本語、悪いな、ただ３ヶ月勉強してから）　XD

i agree with what you said about the kanji, since it is the sae thing as what i said. haha

is your text book talking about 日本語 or 日本人 because i would say both are incorrect.

The Japanese didn't have a written language until some time after the 5th century AD. the Qin Dynasty was from 221-206 BC. Had people from the Qin gone to Japan as your book says, isn't it not likely that Japan would have had a written system much earlier than the 5th or 6th century AD?

From what i have read it was through korean buddhist monks that the chinese characters were introduced and later through trading with china.

a quick look around the internet shows that people were in Japan during the stone age and there have been various migrations since. the Qin dynasty was well after the stone age. the jyoumon, who had been in Japan from the stone age, and the yayoi, who came to japan through the korean peninsula around 2400 years ago. it is most likely the two groups intermingled. note that this would have happened before the Qin dynasty so even if it was chinese that came through korea is was before that time.

The question you`re asking is fundamentally the question that most linguists in Japan ask... And cannot answer.

The fact is, the exact origins of most of the Japanese language is a mystery. The roots of specific words can sometimes be traced, but in general, the older the word the harder it is to be sure... And there are a LOT of theories out there. In the end, it comes down to a lot of guesswork, so reaching a consensus is hard to do.

So you are saying that Japan is called Japan due to a cultural mistake? What I don't understand is, wouldn't the Japanese people want everyone in the rest of the world to call their country Nihon like they do? If a word was used to describe my country that doesn't exist in my language, I know that I would want to have it corrected....Since most people their country is what they care about the most...


Oh yes, during my studies of Asian culture in High School, I found out that the Japanese adopted over 30,000 characters/symbols from the Chinese language. Over the years, the system has changed and has become much more unique. Someone who knows Eastern culture well, can tell the difference between Japanese and Chinese writing, a long time ago, it was much harder.

The reason Jia Hu sounds nothing like Kago is because "Jia HU" is modern mandarin. The pronunciation "Kago" came from ancient Chinese, which sounds almost nothing like modern Mandarin (what most people think is the only type of Chinese). The Japanese imported Kanji from China during the Tang Dynasty (golden age of China) for the Buddhist scriptures that the monk Xuanzhang got from India, so modern Japanese pronunciations of kanji sound more like ancient Chinese than modern mandarin. Got it?

Wow , that really opens my eyes. What I said above is commonly believed by Chinese people.

i think you missed the point of the topic, we are not talking about Japanese taking the Chinese writing system. this is something i believe everyone should know here if they are studying Japanese. we are talking about them taking the pronunciation of the words into their language.

If you read my explanation for the name of Japan you would see it was not a cultural mistake. I personally prefer that my country has different names in different countries. Even if we used the correct names do you realise how hard that would be to pronounce. not many people in western countries without chinese background can even pronounce Shanghai correctly. they read it as if it was a word in our own language so it is pronounced incorrectly. this is essentially how the names for China and Japan came about, from taking what the people or ruling dynasty is called and then it slowly fits into the English language better but over time the sound has changed. this is the evolution of language and words.

as for your point about people calling your country a name you understand in your language, my question is what does it matter? if they are talking to you they will use English and therefore call countries by their English name. a Chinese person is not going to call America 美国 "mei guo" when speaking English. Just like when i speak Japanese to Japanese people I say
日本 "nihon" so you would never have to worry about what other people call your country in their own language unless you speak it also.

I'm glad I could help :) don't be surprised if you find some more differences in the future :)

I figure all languages change over the centuries.

But that still doesn't assure me that Kago is ancient Chinese in origin. If there's any way to trace the origin of Jiahu to Chinese and prove it doesn't come from native Japanese words that existed before the Chinese came over, I should like to see it. Surely there's plenty of ways to see how ancient Chinese was spoken, not just Mandarin and Cantonese modern Chinese forms.

You do realize that Kanji is just writing system right? Yes, many spoken words along with writing system were brought over, but that doesn't mean all modern Japanese words are Chinese in origin. That would mean that Chinese complete erased the Japanese language except for structure. And I doubt that's so. Japanese shares a lot with the Ainu language which is probably pretty untouched by Chinese words. If Chinese words so heavy overlapped and erased the original Japanese I don't think Japanese would still be considered a language isolate.

http://i18.tinypic.com/87dyzdc.gif

I agree with Nyororin. Most linguists don't know. Some Japanese words can be somewhat traced, but most not. I was wondering if perhaps Kago might be one of those words that could be traced.

I've noticed the major Altaic converter this site has no luck with Kago.

Anyway thank you again anrakushi. Maybe it's not certain that Kago is linked to the Korean Ga-ho and Ancient Chinese Jiahu, but I'm happy to at least know that possibility. Much better than nothing and completely what I was looking for, a possible root.

Thanks for now. I may have a new word I'm curious about soon. :)

you are more than welcome, it is an interesting topic for me.

as for seeing how chinese was pronounced i believe it would be very difficult to know for sure as the writing system of chinese does not indicate pronunciation. i believe it would not be an easy task to know how chinese was pronounced 1500-2000 years ago, but it would be an easier task to see how the written language had evolved including grammar thanks to a lot of documents.

Ainu language is often regarded as a language isolate, which means it does not fit in with any language groups. it is also a moribund language, no longer used in the community and not learnt by children. it has had some resent interest by younger people who had started to learn but it is a highly endangered language. what connection it has to japanese would only exist thanks to language contact and transfer. genetic studies show that the ainu were long isolated from japanese, i assume they are referring to much earlier times, and their language developed individually.

you are now stating that japanese is a language isolate but previously you were saying is is in the altaic language group so i did a bit looking around because i don't remember reading that in the past. it seems there is no consensus that it is part of this group. it is sometimes included but it a subject of debate by many. the same goes with Korean, which is even stated to be an isolate language like the Ainu language by linguists. as for the Ainu language it is occasionally added to the altaic group. so given this information i think trying to find a link of a japanese word to an altaic language could be even more fruitless than searching within the Chinese language.

this site which is full of information is a nice one to look at for language groups and information about languages. they put japanese into it's own group consisting of 12 languages:
Ethnologue report for Altaic
Ethnologue report for Japanese

my point of this post being that you shouldn't concentrate your time looking within altaic langauges, especially when there is much debate on whether japanese belongs in this group.

we can debate about the origins of a language forever, haha. but yeah i just hope that from this you will look outside the altaic group and look towards nearby languages that may have influenced vocabulary in Japanese.

That's not what I mean. It doesn't matter at all. I am just curious to know where the word "Japan" came from if the Japanese people themselves did not make such a name. If it was made by outsiders due to a mistake then that is fine, I have just always wanted to know where the word Japan came from if it is not a word they use.

I never studied language as you can see so I don't know how other countries operate. I didn't really know that countries have certain names for others. I thought they called them by what they really were...

as i said i think the reason for you not being aware of this is because you are always interacting in english, thus people will refer to countries by their english name. swap over to another language though and things get different ^^

also names of countries are not generally made by mistake, they have reason at the time and evolve over time. they may sound quite different now from when they were initially used. there is the explanation where the name for japan came from in an earlier post. i don't see how that was at all a mistake. just evolution of a word through time :)

this might be of interest for you, im guessing you're american, sorry if i'm wrong. i'm not american myself but yeah... anyway, list of how america is known in other languages:
Saying "United States of America" in various [email protected]