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Are they all Latin-derived languages? Because that’s the Latin root :)
by Dr_Birdbrain 3y ago
Are they all Latin-derived languages? Because that’s the Latin root :)
- poizan42 3y agoNot Japanese. They got the word from Portuguese missionaries though.
- OJFord 3y agoSo.. no but actually yes?
- fuzztester 3y agoMu. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative)
- poizan42 3y agoI mean, Japanese isn't a Romance (i.e. Latin-derived) language, but the word "pan" is a loan word from one.
- midoridensha 3y agoThe interesting thing about Japanese is that, unlike most other languages, it writes loanwords differently than native words: they're written in the katakana character set rather than kanji (Chinese characters) or hiragana. So "pan" is one of these, since it was borrowed from Portuguese. This rule isn't absolute, though: coffee has a (rarely-used) kanji version, and tobacco ("tabako") is written in hiragana, as is tempura. Sometimes if the word is old enough, it gets treated as a native word.
- OJFord 3y agoMy point is that it just seems like a pointless exception, it's not a coincidence with a separate etymology, it's not that oh actually they both trace their route way further back than Latin, it's just taken from a romance language, so 'really' the answer to the question is yes (on evidence so far). Similarly tamatar in Hindi isn't like tomato (resp. tomate, etc.) because of some Proto-Indo-European root, it's just a devanagari approximation of the Portuguese. I assume the intent in asking 'are they all romance languages' is 'do they all get it from Latin', to which the answer is certainly yes even if the language as a whole is mainly not.