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It wouldn't sound like English if they did. Both Japanese and Korean share a huge amount of vocab with Chinese, and you can tell because all the words sound sim
by latentsea 2y ago
It wouldn't sound like English if they did. Both Japanese and Korean share a huge amount of vocab with Chinese, and you can tell because all the words sound similar too. So, they didn't just take the characters, they also took and adapted version of how to pronounce those characters.
- School-Cotton 2y agoJapanese still uses Chinese characters for native vocabulary that is not derived from Chinese at all.
- latentsea 2y agoIt does, but the loanwords from Chinese vastly outnumber those, so the influence of Chinese words on Japanese is pretty undeniable.
- School-Cotton 2y agoFair enough.
- adrian_b 2y agoThe amount of Chinese words is usually much greater in written Japanese or in legal/technical/scientific jargon than in casual spoken Japanese. The proportion of Chinese words also depends on the manner of accounting the compound words and the inflected words. I have seen the claim that the modern Japanese vocabulary consists roughly of 45% Chinese words, 45% native Japanese words, 8% English words and 2% words borrowed from other languages, mainly from Portuguese or other European languages. I do not know what assumptions have been used to compute these percentages, but they are similar to the frequencies of the words encountered in many modern Japanese texts. There are a lot of modern Japanese words that are composed from two or three or four or even more Chinese words. If all the compounds would be counted separately, the proportion of Chinese words in the Japanese vocabulary could increase a lot.
- numpad0 2y agobtw this is true for historical arguments, but actual size of workable shared vocabulary in common use is tiny - famously "手紙(hand paper)" means postal letters in Japanese, and toilet paper in Chinese.