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Chinese and Japanese grammar have very little relation to each other - about as much as Chinese and English. (The alphabets are, of course, very similar, as the

Chinese and Japanese grammar have very little relation to each other - about as much as Chinese and English. (The alphabets are, of course, very similar, as the Japanese adopted Chinese characters.)

stcredzero 13y ago
The Japanese use Chinese characters. The Japanese also have alphabets. (At least two.) But Chinese characters aren't exactly an alphabet and the Japanese don't use Chinese characters directly as an alphabet, though many characters are based on Chinese ones.
- pjlegato 13y ago
  Since we're being technical, Japanese does not have any alphabet as such; an alphabet has, by definition, a 1 to 1 correspondence between a single character and a sound. Japanese uses syllabaries ('kana' in Japanese), where almost all characters represent more than 1 sound. Hiragana is typically used to write Japanese words and grammatical particles, while katakana is typically used to write foreign words and for special emphasis, roughly analogous to how boldface type is used in English. Both of these kana are derived from Chinese characters, greatly simplified, though the relationship is somewhat distant. Japanese also uses a third writing system called kanji, also not an alphabet, whose name literally means "Han [Chinese] characters" in Japanese. Kanji are logographs, where one character represents one entire word or concept rather than sounds. Most kanji are identical or very similar to modern Chinese characters and are readily intelligible to a Chinese reader, at least in a general sense, though some have diverged a bit. Grammar is another matter entirely. Japanese is a language isolate, a language that is not related to any other known language. (Someone will reply that it's distantly related to Korean, but this is a fringe theory in linguistics that is not widely accepted.) Chinese and Japanese are not grammatically related at all, and any similarity between their syntaxes is coincidental.
  - DougBTX 13y ago
    > an alphabet has, by definition, a 1 to 1 correspondence between a single character and a sound. Do any languages have an alphabet according to this definition?
    - stcredzero 13y ago
      Korean?
      - alxndr 13y ago
        IIRC Hangul has some weird pronunciation quirks depending on where some letters are in a syllable.
      - snogglethorpe 13y ago
        At the least, Korean has voiced-versus-non-voiced-depending-on-word-position changes, and IIRC there are other similar rules (about changing pronunciation in certain contexts) as well.
    - anon4 13y ago
      Cyrillic-using languages generally do.
      - gurkendoktor 13y ago
        The 'o' in Russian is pronounced 'a' half of the time (non-scientific estimate). :(
    - Sharlin 13y ago
      Finnish almost does. There are minor exceptions, though.
  - aninhumer 13y ago
    >a 1 to 1 correspondence between a single character and a sound. While you're correct that the Japanese writing system is not an alphabet, I feel like your definition here is so vague it almost contradicts your point. After all, each kana character has a much closer correspondence with a particular "sound" than many actual alphabets. So to clarify, the characters of an alphabet (notionally) correspond to particular phonemes.
  - snogglethorpe 13y ago
    > Japanese is a language isolate, a language that is not related to any other known language. Someone will reply that it's distantly related to Korean, but this is a fringe theory in linguistics that is not widely accepted When using some strict definition of "related" (e.g. "neither language is a strict descendent of the other"), that may be true, but anybody that's studied both languages has probably noticed that there's an eery similarity between the two, even if it's merely the result of many centuries of cross-pollenization.... My own experience is not so great, I've only studied Korean a bit, but I did study it in Japanese (which I know fairly well), and the similarity made it a lot easier, because so many things corresponded 1-to-1... However Korean friends that are fluent in Japanese constantly rave about how easy it was for them to learn, not just because of the huge amount of shared Chinese-derivative vocabulary (many words are completely identical, with formulaic changes in pronunciation), but because the whole structure of grammar, sentence/conversation-planning, idioms, etc, is so similar that a huge proportion of their Korean instincts pretty much just work as-is in Japanese.
  - meric 13y ago
    Continuing on, Spoken Japanese and Chinese have little to no relation, except for Chinese words imported into Japanese. Hiragana, however, is derived from Chinese characters thousands of years ago. The Chinese characters were used in Japanese writing to write words phonetically. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hiragana_origin.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hiragana_origin.svg

Chinese and Japanese grammar have very little relation to each other - about as much as Chinese and English. (The alphabets are, of course, very similar, as the Japanese adopted Chinese characters.)

stcredzero 13y ago

The Japanese use Chinese characters. The Japanese also have alphabets. (At least two.) But Chinese characters aren't exactly an alphabet and the Japanese don't use Chinese characters directly as an alphabet, though many characters are based on Chinese ones.

pjlegato 13y ago
Since we're being technical, Japanese does not have any alphabet as such; an alphabet has, by definition, a 1 to 1 correspondence between a single character and a sound. Japanese uses syllabaries ('kana' in Japanese), where almost all characters represent more than 1 sound. Hiragana is typically used to write Japanese words and grammatical particles, while katakana is typically used to write foreign words and for special emphasis, roughly analogous to how boldface type is used in English. Both of these kana are derived from Chinese characters, greatly simplified, though the relationship is somewhat distant. Japanese also uses a third writing system called kanji, also not an alphabet, whose name literally means "Han [Chinese] characters" in Japanese. Kanji are logographs, where one character represents one entire word or concept rather than sounds. Most kanji are identical or very similar to modern Chinese characters and are readily intelligible to a Chinese reader, at least in a general sense, though some have diverged a bit. Grammar is another matter entirely. Japanese is a language isolate, a language that is not related to any other known language. (Someone will reply that it's distantly related to Korean, but this is a fringe theory in linguistics that is not widely accepted.) Chinese and Japanese are not grammatically related at all, and any similarity between their syntaxes is coincidental.
- DougBTX 13y ago
  > an alphabet has, by definition, a 1 to 1 correspondence between a single character and a sound. Do any languages have an alphabet according to this definition?
  - stcredzero 13y ago
    Korean?
    - alxndr 13y ago
      IIRC Hangul has some weird pronunciation quirks depending on where some letters are in a syllable.
    - snogglethorpe 13y ago
      At the least, Korean has voiced-versus-non-voiced-depending-on-word-position changes, and IIRC there are other similar rules (about changing pronunciation in certain contexts) as well.
  - anon4 13y ago
    Cyrillic-using languages generally do.
    - gurkendoktor 13y ago
      The 'o' in Russian is pronounced 'a' half of the time (non-scientific estimate). :(
  - Sharlin 13y ago
    Finnish almost does. There are minor exceptions, though.
- aninhumer 13y ago
  >a 1 to 1 correspondence between a single character and a sound. While you're correct that the Japanese writing system is not an alphabet, I feel like your definition here is so vague it almost contradicts your point. After all, each kana character has a much closer correspondence with a particular "sound" than many actual alphabets. So to clarify, the characters of an alphabet (notionally) correspond to particular phonemes.
- snogglethorpe 13y ago
  > Japanese is a language isolate, a language that is not related to any other known language. Someone will reply that it's distantly related to Korean, but this is a fringe theory in linguistics that is not widely accepted When using some strict definition of "related" (e.g. "neither language is a strict descendent of the other"), that may be true, but anybody that's studied both languages has probably noticed that there's an eery similarity between the two, even if it's merely the result of many centuries of cross-pollenization.... My own experience is not so great, I've only studied Korean a bit, but I did study it in Japanese (which I know fairly well), and the similarity made it a lot easier, because so many things corresponded 1-to-1... However Korean friends that are fluent in Japanese constantly rave about how easy it was for them to learn, not just because of the huge amount of shared Chinese-derivative vocabulary (many words are completely identical, with formulaic changes in pronunciation), but because the whole structure of grammar, sentence/conversation-planning, idioms, etc, is so similar that a huge proportion of their Korean instincts pretty much just work as-is in Japanese.
- meric 13y ago
  Continuing on, Spoken Japanese and Chinese have little to no relation, except for Chinese words imported into Japanese. Hiragana, however, is derived from Chinese characters thousands of years ago. The Chinese characters were used in Japanese writing to write words phonetically. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hiragana_origin.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hiragana_origin.svg