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The origins of Japanese words -
12-13-2007, 09:40 AM
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?  Q: Who cares what other people think?!?! A: Japanese people do. 
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12-15-2007, 02:30 PM
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.
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12-15-2007, 03:10 PM
The origins of Japanese words? Sorry, I can't help you, but I have a question of my own...
Well for a long time now, I have had a question concerning a Japanese word that no one can ever answer.... The word Japan in Japanese is "Nihon" and someone from Nihon is "Nihongo". So I have been very confused. If Japanese people call themselves Nihongo, and their land Nihon, then where did the word Japan and Japanese come from? Did other cultures and foreigners who found Japan give it that name? I would love to have it cleared up!
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12-16-2007, 12:17 AM
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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.
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12-16-2007, 12:27 AM
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Anyway, thanks a lot for the help. Much obliged.  Q: Who cares what other people think?!?! A: Japanese people do.
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12-16-2007, 02:35 AM
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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.
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12-16-2007, 02:52 AM
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"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.
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12-16-2007, 02:55 AM
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12-16-2007, 03:31 AM
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. Q: Who cares what other people think?!?! A: Japanese people do.
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12-16-2007, 04:56 AM
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.
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