5 ms·

Because the Bantu languages (most prominently: Swahili) and Japanese have similar sound systems. Finnish is also oddly similar-sounding, or Hawaiian. None of

by retrac 2y ago

Because the Bantu languages (most prominently: Swahili) and Japanese have similar sound systems. Finnish is also oddly similar-sounding, or Hawaiian. None of them are actually related. It's because the syllable is restricted in the number of possible forms, in a similar way. (And they all have approximately five vowels. And a pitch accent.) In Hawaiian, nothing but consonant + vowel syllables are possible. Swahili and Japanese allow an optional final n sound. Finnish is a little more flexible, and syllables can end with an n, r, l or t. No consonant clusters, in any of the languages. No syllables ending with consonants outside the restricted set (if any), in any of the languages. This results in a lot of syllables of the form: i, a, ne, na, ka, ta, po, to... "Pokatokaino". I just made that up and it's probably not a Swahili, Finnish, Hawaiian, or Japanese word -- but it could be. This basic pattern (consonant + vowel + maybe limited option for final consonant) is very common; it's the most common arrangement among the worlds languages. Far more common than languages like English which allow monstrosities like "strengths" (which is 6 consonants and one vowel).

mdp2021 2y ago
> Pokatokaino According to Google Translate, that would be "shortcuts" in Maori. (Reverse, "Pokatata".) Nice!
- Nition 2y ago
  Maori is also another language that has the same vowel sounds as Japanese. Google is being generous in interpreting a nonsense word there though, Pokatata (as you saw when reversing the translation) is the correct spelling.
  - mdp2021 2y ago
    > Google is being generous in interpreting a nonsense word My prudential 'would' (not to mention the safety reverse check) saved me again... ;)
  - latentsea 2y ago
    If you know Japanese go to Google maps and scroll around New Zealand and see how many Maori place names actually make sense in Japanese. There's quite a few fun ones that do. Paraparaumu, matamata, tearai etc. Plenty more.
- e12e 2y ago
  I believe Hawaiian and Maori are somewhat related (Eastern Polynesian family)?
RachelF 2y ago
Something amusing about Japanese vs Xhosa (a Bantu language) is that their words for yes and no are reversed: Japanese Hai = yes, Xhosa - Hai is a no Japanese eeye = no, Xhosa - ewe is yes
- lukan 2y ago
  Amusing as long as you don't agree to something stupid I guess .. Are they pronounced very similar?
- ncpa-cpl 2y ago
  I have seen something similar with Korean and Dutch Korean: Ne = yes Dutch: Nee = no
- euroderf 2y ago
  The "n" sound denoting negative seems deeply ingrained in English (and also in this native English speaker). So Finnish "niin" for affirmative took a very long time to get used to, and to actually begin using. It just felt wrong.
  - scotteric 2y ago
    It goes even deeper than just English. No descends from the Indo-European negation phoneme *ne. You see similar 'n' sound negative words in pretty much every IE language group. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/ne https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...
shiomiru 2y ago
Nit: pokatokaino is unlikely to be Japanese, since word-initial p has morphed into h during the centuries. But it works if you turn it into, say, t. Anyway, I think there's another factor: the common alphabet we transliterate these languages to is quite limited. I suspect the similarities become less obvious if you use something like the IPA, which has better universal correspondence between sounds and letters (i.e. doesn't reduce every sound to the same ~26 symbols).
- fjdjshsh 2y ago
  That's a good point. Latin letters map to a big number of IPA sounds. I think this is specially true with consonants. Vowels, however, might be the same. For example, Spanish has five vowels (a, e, i, o, u in IPA). Japanese also has five IPA vowels and only the "u" is different in IPA
  - kagevf 2y ago
    I don't know IPA, but Japanese e and Spanish e are also different. Spanish e is like English A in "ace", Japanese e is closer to English "eh".
    - trealira 2y ago
      That's the difference between [e] and [ɛ] in IPA (in IPA, with "narrow" phonetic transcription, you enclose the sounds in brackets). In American English, "ace" is [eɪs] and "mess" is [mɛs]. But I don't think that's right; I'm pretty sure both the Japanese e and Spanish e sound exactly the same. And if you pronounced [e] and [ɛ] to native speakers of either Spanish or Japanese, they most likely wouldn't be able to differentiate the two sounds consistently without having had training. I know that in Spanish, realization of e can be either vowel depending on the speaker and context; they might pronounce "tierra" as [tjɛra] and "mesa" as [mesa].
      - kagevf 2y ago
        Japanese e would only ever be [ɛ]. The constructs to produce an [e] sound would be transliterated as "ei" (the quoted are just letters, not meant to be IPA). So, while I disagree that they sound "exactly the same", I do agree that in most cases the differences between [e] and [ɛ] wouldn't be enough to cause confusion between speakers of either language.
quinnirill 2y ago
Pokatokaino is indeed not a Finnish word, but contains multiple: Pokat - slang for sunglasses, Kato - slang version of katso (look), Toka - slang version of toinen (ordinal second), Kaino - timid/coy. Finnish has umlauts though, so quite a lot of words don’t sound like the mentioned languages so much.
- fsckboy 2y ago
  >Pokat - slang for sunglasses, Kato - slang version of katso (look), Toka - slang version of toinen (ordinal second), Kaino - timid/coy sounds like if you give it a shy 2nd look through these glasses, in the dim light it works as a word!
District5524 2y ago
Speaking of similar sound system of Finnish and Japenese, I think we should highlight the discredited language family claim of Uralic-Altaic, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ural-Altaic_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ural-Altaic_languages You can still find tons of other theories of "what else could be related to Uralic"... So far, no African languages were included in these theories. But that's probably just a question of time and politics (and definitely not linguistic research...)
- fsckboy 2y ago
  >the discredited language family claim of Uralic-Altaic I'd substitute "doubtful" for "discredited". The article you link says nothing more damning than "It is now generally agreed [wrt Ural-Altaic] that even the Altaic languages [themselves] do not share a common descent: the similarities between Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic are better explained by diffusion and borrowing", but that wiki comment is a paraphrasal of a source that says "a pattern [that] is easily explainable by borrowing and diffusion rather than common descent", i.e. not "better", just weakening that alternate claim. Also, the Altaic article says that there is still a small group of scholars who adhere to an "Altaic" grouping. And I would add, the lack of existence of an "Altaic" common ancestor to Mongolic, Turkic, Tungusic, and Koreanic says nothing about potential connections between Uralic and any of those 4 independent languages. I'm not expert enough to advocate any position, but I'm interested and it's irritating when I pursue researching my interest to discover people slightly misquoting others or ignoring additional possiblities to make their own pov stronger.
  - canjobear 2y ago
    I’d say the situation is worse than “doubtful”—-There was never any really good evidence for Ural-Altaic. Altaic is a little more complicated, but whatever it is, it doesn’t seem to be a linguistic family tree in the same way that Indo-European is.
ajb 2y ago
That's interesting. From an English perspective katakana (a system for writing words foreign to Japan, which can't write English very well) seems broken, but I guess from what you say that it's probably effective for most languages
- sdrothrock 2y ago
  It may be "broken" in the sense that it's not accurate to the original language in orthography or pronunciation, but it's great because it's internally consistent for speakers of Japanese. I can look at any foreign word in katakana and instantly know how to pronounce it in a way that is intelligible to other people in the language I'm speaking: Japanese. Even with the way English does it for other languages that use the same alphabet, while the orthography may be similar, the pronunciation is generally just left to luck and the speaker's/listener's perception of the word's original language.
  - ajb 2y ago
    Fair - English's orthography is definitely worse.
casey2 2y ago
Yep it's just the coincidence of a simple sound system and finding patterns where none exist. For example saying ba means horse in Japanese isn't exactly correct, horse is uma, ba is just the closest sound that exists which allows Japanese people to pronounce Chinese words like 馬力 circa whenever that word was added to the language, if they took it today it would be ma. It's the equivalent of Latin or Greek words and affixes in English.
CoastalCoder 2y ago
Just curious: what path lead you to know this stuff?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
troad 2y ago
> This basic pattern (consonant + vowel + maybe limited option for final consonant) is very common; it's the most common arrangement among the worlds languages. Far more common than languages like English which allow monstrosities like "strengths" (which is 6 consonants and one vowel). It's a fun spectrum! Italian is often given as an example of this, but Italian does allow more complex consonant clusters at the beginning of a syllable than Hawaiian or Japanese (e.g. gra-do, glo-bo, pneu-ma-ti-co). You see echoes of the Italian proclivity towards final vowels in English-language stereotypes of Italian accents, where a schwa (an 'uh' sound) is added after word final consonants ("I want-uh" etc.). Czech, on the other end of the spectrum, happily allows for things like zmrz-li-na and - famously - strč prst skrz krk (yes, that spelling is phonetic - the rs are syllabic). Interestingly though, Czech evolved out of late Proto-Slavic, and PS had a rule that no syllable end with a consonant (the law of open syllables). This made late Proto-Slavic look more like modern Italian. So, e.g. prst in Czech was prĭ-stŭ in Old Church Slavonic, and krk was krŭ-kŭ.
blacksqr 2y ago
> Finnish is also oddly similar-sounding For a long time I ignorantly assumed that Marimekko was a Japanese brand.
- euroderf 2y ago
  Not to mention Nokia.
unscaled 2y ago
Your general gist is correct: languages with CV (consonant-vowel) phonotactics[1] with a simple vowel systems tend to develop similar features, possibly through convergent evolution: - agglutinative syntax (i.e. combining long sequences of words and suffixes to form complex meanings) - vowel harmony (seems to exist in the earliest attested forms of Old Japanese, but not anymore) - palatalization before front vowels (i, e) - further simplification of the vowel system My only nitpick is that Bantu languages are not relevant here. The author is explicitly focusing on Nigerian languages (although he titled that "Japanese words and name sound African"... Africa is a big continent with just as much language diversity as Asia, if not more). While there are some Bantu languages in Nigeria, they aren't as prominent there as they are in East, Central and South Africa. The author mentions Yoruba, Igbo, Fula, Hausa, Edo and several others - none of them is a Bantu language, although some are related. Even though you can put all of the languages above (except for Hausa) into the hypothetical Niger-Congo macro-family, together with the Bantu languages, they are quite far away by this point. The other issue is that Bantu languages are probably not the best example for "Japanese-sounding" languages. They feature very frequent use of prenasalized consonants. While prenasalization almost certainly existed in Old Japanese[2] and is still retained in some northeastern dialects, this is not something people would identify with "Japanese-sounding" nowadays. Not to mention southern Bantu languages like Zulu and Xhosa that feature heavy usage of click consonants - these are completely alien to Japanese phonology. But this doesn't detract at all from your argument. Languages with similar structure, will often sound similar. I think the other anecdote the author mentions (Plateau State languages sounding Sino-Tiban) also checks out. I am not familiar with any of these languages, but it seems many of them are tonal and based around heavy use of complex monosyllabic morphemes with complex combinations of initial consonant + medial glides(?) + diphthongs + final consonants. This is exactly what so strongly distinguishes the phonology and phonotactics of Sino-Tibetan languages. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonotactics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonotactics [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendaku#Origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendaku#Origin
tomcam 2y ago
I thought Japanese was unpitched
antiterra 2y ago
Regarding the similarities between Hawaiian and Japanese: There are theories among linguists that there is a connection between Austronesian languages and Japanese. These theories don’t seem to be infeasible, but are currently lacking sufficient supporting evidence.

by retrac 2y ago

mdp2021 2y ago

> Pokatokaino According to Google Translate, that would be "shortcuts" in Maori. (Reverse, "Pokatata".) Nice!

Nition 2y ago
Maori is also another language that has the same vowel sounds as Japanese. Google is being generous in interpreting a nonsense word there though, Pokatata (as you saw when reversing the translation) is the correct spelling.
- mdp2021 2y ago
  > Google is being generous in interpreting a nonsense word My prudential 'would' (not to mention the safety reverse check) saved me again... ;)
- latentsea 2y ago
  If you know Japanese go to Google maps and scroll around New Zealand and see how many Maori place names actually make sense in Japanese. There's quite a few fun ones that do. Paraparaumu, matamata, tearai etc. Plenty more.
e12e 2y ago
I believe Hawaiian and Maori are somewhat related (Eastern Polynesian family)?

RachelF 2y ago

Something amusing about Japanese vs Xhosa (a Bantu language) is that their words for yes and no are reversed: Japanese Hai = yes, Xhosa - Hai is a no Japanese eeye = no, Xhosa - ewe is yes

lukan 2y ago
Amusing as long as you don't agree to something stupid I guess .. Are they pronounced very similar?
ncpa-cpl 2y ago
I have seen something similar with Korean and Dutch Korean: Ne = yes Dutch: Nee = no
euroderf 2y ago
The "n" sound denoting negative seems deeply ingrained in English (and also in this native English speaker). So Finnish "niin" for affirmative took a very long time to get used to, and to actually begin using. It just felt wrong.
- scotteric 2y ago
  It goes even deeper than just English. No descends from the Indo-European negation phoneme *ne. You see similar 'n' sound negative words in pretty much every IE language group. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/ne https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...

shiomiru 2y ago

Nit: pokatokaino is unlikely to be Japanese, since word-initial p has morphed into h during the centuries. But it works if you turn it into, say, t. Anyway, I think there's another factor: the common alphabet we transliterate these languages to is quite limited. I suspect the similarities become less obvious if you use something like the IPA, which has better universal correspondence between sounds and letters (i.e. doesn't reduce every sound to the same ~26 symbols).

fjdjshsh 2y ago
That's a good point. Latin letters map to a big number of IPA sounds. I think this is specially true with consonants. Vowels, however, might be the same. For example, Spanish has five vowels (a, e, i, o, u in IPA). Japanese also has five IPA vowels and only the "u" is different in IPA
- kagevf 2y ago
  I don't know IPA, but Japanese e and Spanish e are also different. Spanish e is like English A in "ace", Japanese e is closer to English "eh".
  - trealira 2y ago
    That's the difference between [e] and [ɛ] in IPA (in IPA, with "narrow" phonetic transcription, you enclose the sounds in brackets). In American English, "ace" is [eɪs] and "mess" is [mɛs]. But I don't think that's right; I'm pretty sure both the Japanese e and Spanish e sound exactly the same. And if you pronounced [e] and [ɛ] to native speakers of either Spanish or Japanese, they most likely wouldn't be able to differentiate the two sounds consistently without having had training. I know that in Spanish, realization of e can be either vowel depending on the speaker and context; they might pronounce "tierra" as [tjɛra] and "mesa" as [mesa].
    - kagevf 2y ago
      Japanese e would only ever be [ɛ]. The constructs to produce an [e] sound would be transliterated as "ei" (the quoted are just letters, not meant to be IPA). So, while I disagree that they sound "exactly the same", I do agree that in most cases the differences between [e] and [ɛ] wouldn't be enough to cause confusion between speakers of either language.

quinnirill 2y ago

Pokatokaino is indeed not a Finnish word, but contains multiple: Pokat - slang for sunglasses, Kato - slang version of katso (look), Toka - slang version of toinen (ordinal second), Kaino - timid/coy. Finnish has umlauts though, so quite a lot of words don’t sound like the mentioned languages so much.

fsckboy 2y ago
>Pokat - slang for sunglasses, Kato - slang version of katso (look), Toka - slang version of toinen (ordinal second), Kaino - timid/coy sounds like if you give it a shy 2nd look through these glasses, in the dim light it works as a word!

District5524 2y ago

Speaking of similar sound system of Finnish and Japenese, I think we should highlight the discredited language family claim of Uralic-Altaic, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ural-Altaic_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ural-Altaic_languages You can still find tons of other theories of "what else could be related to Uralic"... So far, no African languages were included in these theories. But that's probably just a question of time and politics (and definitely not linguistic research...)

fsckboy 2y ago
>the discredited language family claim of Uralic-Altaic I'd substitute "doubtful" for "discredited". The article you link says nothing more damning than "It is now generally agreed [wrt Ural-Altaic] that even the Altaic languages [themselves] do not share a common descent: the similarities between Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic are better explained by diffusion and borrowing", but that wiki comment is a paraphrasal of a source that says "a pattern [that] is easily explainable by borrowing and diffusion rather than common descent", i.e. not "better", just weakening that alternate claim. Also, the Altaic article says that there is still a small group of scholars who adhere to an "Altaic" grouping. And I would add, the lack of existence of an "Altaic" common ancestor to Mongolic, Turkic, Tungusic, and Koreanic says nothing about potential connections between Uralic and any of those 4 independent languages. I'm not expert enough to advocate any position, but I'm interested and it's irritating when I pursue researching my interest to discover people slightly misquoting others or ignoring additional possiblities to make their own pov stronger.
- canjobear 2y ago
  I’d say the situation is worse than “doubtful”—-There was never any really good evidence for Ural-Altaic. Altaic is a little more complicated, but whatever it is, it doesn’t seem to be a linguistic family tree in the same way that Indo-European is.

ajb 2y ago

That's interesting. From an English perspective katakana (a system for writing words foreign to Japan, which can't write English very well) seems broken, but I guess from what you say that it's probably effective for most languages

sdrothrock 2y ago
It may be "broken" in the sense that it's not accurate to the original language in orthography or pronunciation, but it's great because it's internally consistent for speakers of Japanese. I can look at any foreign word in katakana and instantly know how to pronounce it in a way that is intelligible to other people in the language I'm speaking: Japanese. Even with the way English does it for other languages that use the same alphabet, while the orthography may be similar, the pronunciation is generally just left to luck and the speaker's/listener's perception of the word's original language.
- ajb 2y ago
  Fair - English's orthography is definitely worse.

casey2 2y ago

Yep it's just the coincidence of a simple sound system and finding patterns where none exist. For example saying ba means horse in Japanese isn't exactly correct, horse is uma, ba is just the closest sound that exists which allows Japanese people to pronounce Chinese words like 馬力 circa whenever that word was added to the language, if they took it today it would be ma. It's the equivalent of Latin or Greek words and affixes in English.

CoastalCoder 2y ago

Just curious: what path lead you to know this stuff?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

troad 2y ago

> This basic pattern (consonant + vowel + maybe limited option for final consonant) is very common; it's the most common arrangement among the worlds languages. Far more common than languages like English which allow monstrosities like "strengths" (which is 6 consonants and one vowel). It's a fun spectrum! Italian is often given as an example of this, but Italian does allow more complex consonant clusters at the beginning of a syllable than Hawaiian or Japanese (e.g. gra-do, glo-bo, pneu-ma-ti-co). You see echoes of the Italian proclivity towards final vowels in English-language stereotypes of Italian accents, where a schwa (an 'uh' sound) is added after word final consonants ("I want-uh" etc.). Czech, on the other end of the spectrum, happily allows for things like zmrz-li-na and - famously - strč prst skrz krk (yes, that spelling is phonetic - the rs are syllabic). Interestingly though, Czech evolved out of late Proto-Slavic, and PS had a rule that no syllable end with a consonant (the law of open syllables). This made late Proto-Slavic look more like modern Italian. So, e.g. prst in Czech was prĭ-stŭ in Old Church Slavonic, and krk was krŭ-kŭ.

blacksqr 2y ago

> Finnish is also oddly similar-sounding For a long time I ignorantly assumed that Marimekko was a Japanese brand.

euroderf 2y ago
Not to mention Nokia.

unscaled 2y ago

Your general gist is correct: languages with CV (consonant-vowel) phonotactics[1] with a simple vowel systems tend to develop similar features, possibly through convergent evolution: - agglutinative syntax (i.e. combining long sequences of words and suffixes to form complex meanings) - vowel harmony (seems to exist in the earliest attested forms of Old Japanese, but not anymore) - palatalization before front vowels (i, e) - further simplification of the vowel system My only nitpick is that Bantu languages are not relevant here. The author is explicitly focusing on Nigerian languages (although he titled that "Japanese words and name sound African"... Africa is a big continent with just as much language diversity as Asia, if not more). While there are some Bantu languages in Nigeria, they aren't as prominent there as they are in East, Central and South Africa. The author mentions Yoruba, Igbo, Fula, Hausa, Edo and several others - none of them is a Bantu language, although some are related. Even though you can put all of the languages above (except for Hausa) into the hypothetical Niger-Congo macro-family, together with the Bantu languages, they are quite far away by this point. The other issue is that Bantu languages are probably not the best example for "Japanese-sounding" languages. They feature very frequent use of prenasalized consonants. While prenasalization almost certainly existed in Old Japanese[2] and is still retained in some northeastern dialects, this is not something people would identify with "Japanese-sounding" nowadays. Not to mention southern Bantu languages like Zulu and Xhosa that feature heavy usage of click consonants - these are completely alien to Japanese phonology. But this doesn't detract at all from your argument. Languages with similar structure, will often sound similar. I think the other anecdote the author mentions (Plateau State languages sounding Sino-Tiban) also checks out. I am not familiar with any of these languages, but it seems many of them are tonal and based around heavy use of complex monosyllabic morphemes with complex combinations of initial consonant + medial glides(?) + diphthongs + final consonants. This is exactly what so strongly distinguishes the phonology and phonotactics of Sino-Tibetan languages. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonotactics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonotactics [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendaku#Origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendaku#Origin

tomcam 2y ago

I thought Japanese was unpitched

antiterra 2y ago

Regarding the similarities between Hawaiian and Japanese: There are theories among linguists that there is a connection between Austronesian languages and Japanese. These theories don’t seem to be infeasible, but are currently lacking sufficient supporting evidence.