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I think it's safe to assume that the Portuguese "pão" (bread) was pronounced much closer to "pan" around the time they made contact with Japan, and that's what
by pilaf 3y ago
I think it's safe to assume that the Portuguese "pão" (bread) was pronounced much closer to "pan" around the time they made contact with Japan, and that's what stuck in Japan while the Portuguese pronunciation kept evolving. I find it strange otherwise that the Japanese word is closer in pronunciation to the Spanish "pan", or even the French "pain", than the modern day Portuguese word.
- hsjqllzlfkf 3y agoDidn't the Japanese have bread or balconies before the Portuguese arrived? How does that work?
- hmry 3y agoHow do people survive without bread? This may be hard to believe, but it is actually possible. The trick is eating something else. :) (They did have steamed grain products, just not baked ones.) Don't know about balconies.
- account42 3y ago> Don't know about balconies. I don't suggest eating balconies.
- p3rls 3y agoUNLESS you're on a Japanese game show and it smells of chocolate
- hsjqllzlfkf 3y agoI didn't ask how people survive without bread. I asked whether the Japanese had bread before the Portuguese got there.
- resolutebat 3y agoSteamed/baked wheat buns of various kinds have been eaten in China for a long time and are known in Japan as well under the name manju (饅頭). Wiki says they were first introduced in 1341, but they're still associated with Chinese food and typically served as sweet snacks with tea, not as a meal. Savoury meat buns (肉まん nikuman) do exist, but they're nowhere near as common as bao in China. There are also many cracker-like hard "breads" made from rice flour, notably sensei, but these too are snacks, not mains.
- earthboundkid 3y agoAutocorrect changed senbei to sensei.
- potatototoo99 3y agoNo they didn't have bread before the Portuguese arrived, but that's also to be expected given the prevalence of rice versus wheat.
- hsjqllzlfkf 3y agoWhat, you can't grind rice, make flavour out of it, and bread out of that?
- ricardobeat 3y agoRice flour has no gluten, so no, you can’t use it like wheat to make bread. You can make cakes with rice though, which they did have. (When you see modern gluten-free bread in a bakery/supermarket, it’s still basically a cake recipe, tweaked to resemble the texture of bread)
- rjsw 3y agoGluten-free bread uses a binding agent, typically xanthan gum [1], a small amount of it is really noticeable when you are doing home baking. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanthan_gum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanthan_gum
- anon291 3y agoI really encourage you to try this and see what happens. You need wheat to make bread. The only way to make leavened bread from rice is using highly processed synthetic ingredients to create the gluten structure.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- boomboomsubban 3y agoAccording to the Japanese wiki page on bread, it was introduced in 1543 then banned as part of the Christian bans. They mostly ate whole grains, then used flour for noodles.
- Lapha 3y agoJapanese has a couple of words for 'door' (some of which refer to Japanese style sliding doors): 戸, 扉, 障子, but one of the more frequent ones is ドア which is a loan word from English 'door'. Adoption of loan words can be strange.
- 77pt77 3y agoThey systematically use the English word for sex, yet I'm sure they'd been doing it far before contact with westerners.
- lioeters 3y agoThat reminds me of something from a childhood TV show, an invention from the future called どこでもドア (the Anywhere Door). As for why they use a loan word for "door", I'm guessing it's due to the wide adoption of Western-style doors for which there's no equivalent word in Japanese. And why loaned from English instead of any other language, like Portuguese? I imagine it has some historical reason, related to which country such doors were originally imported from.
- arghwhat 3y agoWestern-style fluffy bread was not present in Japan before Portuguese trade. The introduction through trade also applies to other eastern countries - China was exposed through the silk road, India through Portuguese and middle eastern trade. You have similarly surprising culinary events in the West. Tomatoes weren't introduced to Italy until the 16th century, an tomato sauce wasn't a thing before the 18th century - before that, pasta (itself assumed to come from Chinese noodles) was eaten dry with your fingers. Potatoes first arrived in Europe around the same time.
- xdennis 3y ago> Didn't the Japanese have bread or balconies before the Portuguese arrived? How does that work? I ask myself that every day. I think the answer is prestige. In my language, Romanian, many words are borrowed from English because there's no home-grown equivalent, like "hacker". But even common words are being replaced with English ones. E.g. fashion instead of modă, know-how instead of cunoștințe (knowledge), brand — marcă, however – însă (you know your language is in danger of disappearing when the conjunctions are being replaced). This is in spite of the fact that people can often hardly pronounce the English words, for example businessman is pronounced /biznismen/ (with no way to differentiate between man and men), or pronouncing "guard" as "goo-ard".
- OfSanguineFire 3y agoSure, there are loanwords that have become rooted in Romanian. But (unless one is part of a minority of people using English every day e.g. at work) a lot of those English words in Romanian are affectations of youth that disappear with age. The linguistic behavior of all my hipster friends changed radically as soon as they settled down into staid family life.
- AlecSchueler 3y agoSometimes they don't disappear with age and they become the new standard for the next generation. If age-related reversion to the old way of speaking was a universal given then we wouldn't see half the linguistic drift that we do.
- xdennis 3y agoI don't think they're affectations of the youth. Take the term "fake news". If journalists were in the business of informing people they would translate it ("știri false"), but they always say "fake news". You also hear experts use English terms because it makes them look more sophisticated. For example instead of saying the equivalent of "Ukrainians need to be trained to use American weapons" with all-Romanian words, you'll hear "Ukrainians need KNOW-HOW to use American weapons" with "know-how" being untranslated, even though this sentence is more awkward than the first one.
- rendang 3y agoI wonder this when I studied Russian and saw all the French/German loanwords. "Did the Russians not use to have screens/beaches/furniture before the Enlightenment?"
- demetrius 3y ago> Did the Russians not use to have screens/beaches/furniture before the Enlightenment? I don't know the evolution of the terms in question, but I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't! Like, what is a beach (or пляж)? It's basically берег (riverbank/seashore) but intended for recreation use. Did people of the past have enough time to recreationally use their seashores/riverbanks? I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't. Same about furniture/мебель. I would assume that in the past (at least in the villages), people would often have benches, beds, tables custom-made specifically for their house, and they would not be meant to be moved out. Мебель/furniture presupposes that people produce it in one place, and then people move it to their house, and this was often not the case in the past. If your bed is made when your house is built, and cannot be moved out because bed frame goes directly into your wall, is that still furniture? Is furniture a useful word to describe that? (Not sure about screens)
- fuzztester 3y ago>the Portuguese "pão" (bread) In India, the word pao or pav in street food / snacks like vada pav and pav bhaji, probably comes from the Portuguese. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vada_pav https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vada_pav https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pav_bhaji https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pav_bhaji My favorite variant is khada pav bhaji, in which the vegetables are in chunks, not mashed.
- jghn 3y agoThat's interesting. I would have assumed they were cognate from PIE but it appears not.
- fuzztester 3y agoThe icing on the vada pav is the fried chillis, so to to speak.
- fredguth 3y agoThe nasal sound of pão is very difficult for foreigners.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago> I think it's safe to assume that the Portuguese "pão" (bread) was pronounced much closer to "pan" around the time they made contact with Japan The evolution of nasal vowels in Portuguese out of Latin *n predates contact with Japan by centuries (see Nasal Vowel Evolution in Romance by Rodney Sampson, Oxford University Press, 1999). It’s not unusual at all that Japanese, a language without nasal vowels, would then replace the Portuguese nasal vowel with the closest equivalent it had.
- yorwba 3y agoJapanese has nasal vowels and indeed the "a" in Japanese "pan" is nasalized.
- OfSanguineFire 3y agoI obviously meant phonemic nasal vowels. In Japanese, nasality of vowels appears in the context of a nasal consonant, so when borrowing the Portuguese word, Japanese had to supply the final consonant.
- yorwba 3y agoWiktionary says the pronunciation of modern Portuguese pão is [pɐ̃ʊ̯̃] in IPA. Modern Japanese has [p] but not [ɐ̃]. The vowel closest to [ɐ] is [a], and to get the nasalization of [ɐ̃], the following consonant needs to be [ɴ], giving "pan" [pãɴ]. As a bonus, [ʊ̯̃] is a back nasal vowel and [ɴ] is a back nasal consonant. So modern Japanese "pan" is a good match for modern Portuguese pão. To support your theory, you'd need to look at a language where borrowings with nasal vowels and syllable-final nasal consonants can reliably be distingished from each other, i.e. not Japanese.
- bradrn 3y ago> [ɴ] is a back nasal consonant Not quite! This is a peculiarity of Japanese transcription: the moraic nasal [0] is often transcribed as /ɴ/ or /N/ in phonemic representation, while its phonetic realisation varies between [m~n~ɲ~ŋ]; it is true uvular [ɴ] only utterance-finally, but apparently even that is controversial. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_phonology#Moraic_nasal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_phonology#Moraic_nasa...
- yorwba 3y agoI wrote [ɴ] instead of /ɴ/ for a reason. It's true that the phoneme /ɴ/ has various realizations (including as no consonant at all, only nasalizing the preceding vowel), but when considering "pan" in isolation, the /ɴ/ is utterance-final and has the commonly accepted realization [ɴ].
- bradrn 3y agoI can agree with that. Thanks for clarifying! (Maybe I’m just too used to people getting confused about this stuff…)
- JoeJonathan 3y ago“Pão” is pronounced pretty similarly to “pan,” and nothing at all like “pow
- SwiftyBug 3y agoI wonder if the Chinese bao comes from pão as well.
- Umofomia 3y agoNo, this is a false cognate. Chinese bāo (包) is short for miànbāo (麵包), literally meaning "flour wrap/package", and its use has been attested since the Song Dynasty (ca. 11th century), whereas the Portuguese didn't have contact with China until the 16th century. The pronunciation of 包 at that time was still mostly similar to what it is today – using IPA notation, it is reconstructed as /pˠau/, compared to /pau̯/ today.
- zeruch 3y agoIT was more likely because the heavy nasal/adenoidal vowels in Portuguese were extremely difficult for Japanese speakers.
- 77pt77 3y ago> I find it strange otherwise that the Japanese word is closer in pronunciation to the Spanish "pan", or even the French "pain", than the modern day Portuguese word. That's because Japanese is extremely phonetically poor.