If Graf Zeppelin was still in Germany, then she would have played the straight man to a fault and point out that Tenryu's new Death Blow is the deadly 'Ballpoint Pen strike'.
I do love German vocabulary in this sense. I know that you are doing a meme and that I shouldn't explain the joke, but the word is literally construed this way. The Kugelschreiber is a Schreiber (writer, as writing device) that uses a kugel (ball).
I do love German vocabulary in this sense. I know that you are doing a meme and that I shouldn't explain the joke, but the word is literally construed this way. The Kugelschreiber is a Schreiber (writer, as writing device) that uses a kugel (ball).
This is a ball writer. It writes (with) balls.
In related news:
Das ist ein Flugzeugträger. Er trägt Flugzeuge.
This is an aircraft carrier. It carries aircraft.
Also:
This is the Achtklässlerkrankheit. It krankheits Achtklässlers It's a Krankheit for Achtklässler.
I do love German vocabulary in this sense. I know that you are doing a meme and that I shouldn't explain the joke, but the word is literally construed this way. The Kugelschreiber is a Schreiber (writer, as writing device) that uses a kugel (ball).
Remarkably similar to Chinese vocabulary constructs (ballpoint pen there is literally "round bead pen" if you want to be asinine with the translation)... but there are only so many ways to assemble terms, I guess.
Meanwhile supposedly Japanese is not remotely grammatically similar to Chinese, hmm...
It's Ido's base. It have a personality distortion field that change the atmosphere of the base to something like a sitcom. Like how nonco's base turns all the girls into crazies (look at Kongou's sisters)
Remarkably similar to Chinese vocabulary constructs (ballpoint pen there is literally "round bead pen" if you want to be asinine with the translation)... but there are only so many ways to assemble terms, I guess.
Meanwhile supposedly Japanese is not remotely grammatically similar to Chinese, hmm...
TL;DR
Japanese word morphology (how words are constructed, but not how they are arranged) is highly similar to Chinese, but not grammar. Notably, however, Japanese permits greater modification of words (e.g. declension of verbs and 'adjectives') because of the existence of kana, and allows for inverted noun + verb combinations not normally seen in Chinese. The classic example is 切腹(seppuku) vs. 腹切り (harakiri), both of which refer to the same action (seppuku emphasizes the act as an exalted ritual though, while harakiri can refer to generic suicide and is used far more crudely).
Japanese also borrows foreign (non-East Asian) loanwords far more readily than Chinese. Examples include the ball-pen, as well as others like arubaito (Ger: Arbeit) and pan (Por: pão).
It is also important to note that identically written words may have completely different meanings in Chinese and Japanese. Some notable ones include 勉強、大丈夫、邪魔、切手、先生、非常、娘、湯、文句、怪我, etc. Suffice to say if you can't tell the differences in meanings between say, at least 80% of the above words and their Chinese equivalents (勉强,大丈夫,邪魔,切手,先生,非常,娘,汤,文句,怪我) you probably shouldn't be translating Japanese.
Haruna is daijoubu, and not a great husband or man.
In a similar vein English words share many morphological similarities with French and German (compare paper and French papier and German Papier, and also English sword with German Schwert), but there are significant differences in grammar (notably, English doesn't have gendered nouns and adjectives unlike the other two). There are also false friends, words that look almost the same but have different meanings, like préservatif and Präservativ (both condoms, not preservatives).
Japanese word morphology (how words are constructed, but not how they are arranged) is highly similar to Chinese, but not grammar. Notably, however, Japanese permits greater modification of words (e.g. declension of verbs and 'adjectives') because of the existence of kana, and allows for inverted noun + verb combinations not normally seen in Chinese. The classic example is 切腹(seppuku) vs. 腹切り (harakiri), both of which refer to the same action (seppuku emphasizes the act as an exalted ritual though, while harakiri can refer to generic suicide and is used far more crudely).
Japanese also borrows foreign (non-East Asian) loanwords far more readily than Chinese. Examples include the ball-pen, as well as others like arubaito (Ger: Arbeit) and pan (Por: pão).
It is also important to note that identically written words may have completely different meanings in Chinese and Japanese. Some notable ones include 勉強、大丈夫、邪魔、切手、先生、非常、娘、湯、文句、怪我, etc. Suffice to say if you can't tell the differences in meanings between say, at least 80% of the above words and their Chinese equivalents (勉强,大丈夫,邪魔,切手,先生,非常,娘,汤,文句,怪我) you probably shouldn't be translating Japanese.
Haruna is daijoubu, and not a great husband or man.
In a similar vein English words share many morphological similarities with French and German (compare paper and French papier and German Papier, and also English sword with German Schwert), but there are significant differences in grammar (notably, English doesn't have gendered nouns and adjectives unlike the other two). There are also false friends, words that look almost the same but have different meanings, like préservatif and Präservativ (both condoms, not preservatives).
The Chinese language has a tendency to adopt sinification of foreign vocabulary that are introduced into common usage. Unlike Japanese, Chinese does not favor resorting to sound consonant emulation, and would rather draw from the huge set of characters in order to render the meanings of a foreign 'concept'. Name as well as commercial products are places where the Chinese do relent (think of how the French approach these things) on the matter of loanwords. This is further complicated by the fact that there's no singular linguistic body for Chinese as a whole, so you wind up with cases such as 'Video game consoles' being rendered as 遊戲機 (Taiwan) /游乐器 (China).
Having said that, exposure to English has led to playing it more loose. 沙發 (shafa, as Sofa) is one example where vowel approximation is used for an object.
Japanese doesn't always 'resort' to emulation, particularly in the sciences (doubly so in physics) there are plenty of translated, rather than adapted foreign words in use - the wasei-kango. Post-Meiji, there was a need to translate foreign texts into Japanese, and thus the translators had to in many cases invent new translations for foreign concepts, such as revolution /kakumei/ 革命 and democracy /民主/; foreign terms as police /keisatsu/ 警察 and telephone /denwa/ 電話 and scientific terms like quantum mechanics /ryuushi rikigaku/ 量子力学 - which many Japanese (and Chinese, as many were later borrowed from Japanese when it became necessary to do the same thing) speakers might not know that the term is a. a fairly recent introduction to the language and b. that the term was invented in Japan.
Certainly, modern Japanese just defaults to taking in the word as a unit and plopping it in the vocabulary as-is in kana; this is sometimes done deliberately to differentiate it from similar words in Japanese that are close to, but not exactly, the same (such as cow's milk being both /gyuunyu/ and /miruku/ (although the latter has expanded to be able to refer to other milks when prefixed). STEM fields are still quite partial to translating a word into something in kanji (sometimes just borrowing the Chinese term, or taking said term and modifying it where the hanji and kanji aren't exactly the same due to various factors) rather than leaving it in katakana; especially where it would be quite a mouthful, plus it allows for compounds to be made more easily - such as in physics where unless it's someones name (such as the Higgs Boson), particles are all in kanji, letting a physicist just write down a compound word for a longer concept rather than wrestling with long and unwieldy katakana loanwords.
However, there is a different category, where rather than using kana, ateji were used, similar to how some Chinese loanwords are - kanji just used for the sound; such as 亜細亜 /ajia/ 'Asia'. This further led to the use of 亜 as a shorthand for Asia, and then found its way into compounds - rather than being a shorthand for 亜細亜, 亜 came to just mean 'Asia' by itself, so that 東亜 /toua/ 'East Asia' is considered a non-contracted word (i.e. it's not a contracted 東亜細亜; c.f. 'South-East Asia' and 'SE Asia'). This is where some of the differences between Chinese and Japanese can pop us, as NNescio wrote - words were independently developed from existing characters, applied differently to get to quite a different end point. This is especially the case where sounds have changed over time (/tefu/ > /chou/ for example), meaning that while a word might have sounded much more similar in the 1200s, today it is quite different, meaning that the ateji could be strange to a Chinese speaker as the sound isn't even close to the Chinese reading (though it might well have been when the term was coined); or that a kanji was used just for the sound - but the reading of the kanji had changed significantly from the original Chinese-ish pronunciation, so that using the kanji at all seems a bit off compared to what would perhaps been used in Chinese. (There is also the third option, where the Japanese pronunciation comes from the Wu, rather than the Han pronuncation, but it's much less common)
Chinese, lacking the equivalent of kana (leaving aside pinyin and bopomofo), doesn't really have the same ability as Japanese to take a foreign word and just slot it in as easily; even in the commercial world, care must be taken in selecting which hanzi to use, as just selecting the closest (or most appealing) sound to the the term in the original language can lead to a less-than desirable results. Case in point, while it is a urban legend that Coke was originally marketed with 蝌蚪啃蜡, a decent sound match did proved impossible for their marketing team, leaving them to use 可口可乐 instead - as opposed to Japan, where it can just be done in katakana (having no attached meaning to themselves, unlike hanzi).
TL;DR
Some foreign words were translated into Japanese using kanji. Some words in kana are the same, but different to some in kanji. STEM still translated words into kanji rather than using kana. Words translated into kanji can be used as ingredients to make even more new words. Chinese did this differently sometimes, making Japanese and Chinese have words that are written the same, but mean different things. Sounds in language change, so kanjified words can look kinda weird to a Chinese person later. Chinese doesn't have a non-meaning-attached writing system like Japanese does.
The discussion about the issue with change in pronunciation is an ongoing one. One glaring example is the ascendance of Mandarin as the ‘established’ Chinese tongue only after the fall of Ming dynasty (AD 1644), where widespread butchering changed the court makeup significantly and the Hebei tongue replaced the Ming court pronunciation when the mass killing was done and over with.
As such, Chinese is a language that has to largely depend on the meaning and reading of the characters, not so much in the phonetics, in remaining effective as a lingua franca. As shown with Paracite, there are cases where translations from concepts that would lend better to resorting to character combination than to try to approximate the sound, especially when we are talking about this Chinese language that straddles atop several different dialects that are not always mutual intelligible at that!
As Chinese isn’t one homogenous spoken language as with Korea and Japan, the character choice issue at times move away, as with the Coca-cola example, from mere consonants but with the meaning having a more serious implication. As I said before, the fact that cultural division within the last century have only led to even more divergence where Hong Kong, Taiwan and PRC would vary widely in the choice of characters used. For that matter, the cultural affinity to spheres of influence have even led to different loan words being added to the vocabulary in the last century. Taiwan for example took べんとう弁当directly and transliterated it as 便當 , while HK calls it 飯盒 (meal box.)
There’s been debate thrown about with pinyin serving as hangul for Chinese in the future at that. Chinese use of pinyin is a very, very modern invention, with pinyin or zhuyin being narrowly confined to the Romanization of mandarin tones. It is true that pinyin/zhuyin would be equivalent to romaji as they are insulated from having any meaning affixed to them, but the fact that it’s only applicable to Mandarin and it being unable to replace Chinese characters remain obvious to all.
NNescio's point on mutual (un)intelligibility of Chinese characters in cross-cultural exchange is spot-on to say the least. The good thing about making sense of context is that we almost never read the characters piecemeal, but rather in a body of text. 怪我は大丈夫 for example would be a case where a Chinese reader would immediately recognize that these word choices aren't used in Chinese parlance, even if they can't make heads or tails out of that short quip; one would need some degree of familiarity to turn that into 傷勢要不要緊.
...even if they can't make heads or tails out of that short quip...
Don't even get me started on 4-character idioms... While some of them are understandable as an English speaker translating from Japanese, some get into 'Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra' territory (Though to be fair, those are fairly rare). That's when I refer to my handy-dandy Japanese 4-character idiom dictionary; as even Japanese people are baffled sometimes.
I can only assume that Chinese has the same thing, and the youth of today butchering them.
Don't even get me started on 4-character idioms... While some of them are understandable as an English speaker translating from Japanese, some get into 'Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra' territory (Though to be fair, those are fairly rare). That's when I refer to my handy-dandy Japanese 4-character idiom dictionary; as even Japanese people are baffled sometimes.
I can only assume that Chinese has the same thing, and the youth of today butchering them.
We have them (we call them chengyu), and they're used quite often in both daily speech and writing. Again, however, we do encounter some minor false friends between chengyu and yojijukugo. Usually they carry about the same literal meaning, but the connotation can differ significantly.
Off my head I can recall 朝三暮四, which means "fickle, mercurial" in Chinese but "verbal trickery disguising the same as different" in Japanese. Interestingly, the Japanese meaning is closer to the original passage in Zhuangzi (the book), where the idiom is derived from.
This presents a lot of problems to careless Japanese -> Chinese translators. A lot of them I've seen just leave a four-character idiom (or any other idiom derived from Chinese classics) as it is without any consideration of whether there are any differences in meaning and connotation between the two languages.
On a related note, a lot of Japanese On'yomi pronunciations are closer to the original Middle Chinese pronunciations instead of Modern Chinese. The similarities can sill be heard in Southern Chinese dialects (Minnan, Cantonese, etc.). Hardly surprising, considering that the On'yomi pronunciations were derived from pronunciations in the Tang, Song, Ming (with some Northern Wu) dynasties. Plus I think Japanese had far less sound shifts compared to Chinese, being a smaller insular country and all.
Which brings us to this point:
Paracite said:
This is especially the case where sounds have changed over time (/tefu/ > /chou/ for example), meaning that while a word might have sounded much more similar in the 1200s, today it is quite different, meaning that the ateji could be strange to a Chinese speaker as the sound isn't even close to the Chinese reading (though it might well have been when the term was coined); or that a kanji was used just for the sound - but the reading of the kanji had changed significantly from the original Chinese-ish pronunciation, so that using the kanji at all seems a bit off compared to what would perhaps been used in Chinese. (There is also the third option, where the Japanese pronunciation comes from the Wu, rather than the Han pronuncation, but it's much less common)
Back before I was more proficient in Japanese, I found it useful to sound-out the words in a Southern Chinese dialect when trying to figure out ateji. Usually it's Cantonese. Notably, 亜米利加 (ya-mi-li-jia)doesn't make much sense in Mandarin Chinese, but the pronunciation becomes uncannily similar in Cantonese (aa-mai-lei-gaa).
Don't even get me started on 4-character idioms... While some of them are understandable as an English speaker translating from Japanese, some get into 'Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra' territory (Though to be fair, those are fairly rare). That's when I refer to my handy-dandy Japanese 4-character idiom dictionary; as even Japanese people are baffled sometimes.
I can only assume that Chinese has the same thing, and the youth of today butchering them.
The foundation needed to read and apply idioms and prose even is not an easy thing. Look at this short section of Kojiki, which is just prose. Most Japanese would not have to read the text on the Yamagarasu being sent to guide Emperor Jimmu verbatim. That's how big the gap is when we go from contemporary to the classics.
天神御子 自此於奧方莫便入幸 荒神甚多 今自天遣八咫烏 故其八咫烏引道 從其立後應幸行
For that matter, the difference in characters become even more exacerbated with idioms. Look at this. Japanese idiom 慇懃無礼 to a Chinese reader wouldn't click directly due to an inability to connect this Japanese addition of 心 radical on 殷勤 and how it would be used with 無礼.
(殷勤 in this context means courteously well-mannered, heart radicals to the bottom in conjunction with 無礼 ill-mannered combines to mean just that you are just putting up a show for the so-and-so who's lower than dirt in your mind. I don't know the etymology of the idiom here.)
NNescio said:
On a related note, a lot of Japanese On'yomi pronunciations are closer to the original Middle Chinese pronunciations instead of Modern Chinese. The similarities can sill be heard in Southern Chinese dialects (Minnan, Cantonese, etc.). Hardly surprising, considering that the On'yomi pronunciations were derived from pronunciations in the Tang, Song, Ming (with some Northern Wu) dynasties. Plus I think Japanese had far less sound shifts compared to Chinese, being a smaller insular country and all.
Totally understandable when we consider that the Japanese cultural exchange with China peaked in Heian years, became less and less frequent, got interrupted by the Mongols, and that cross-cultural exchange just dried up by the time Imjin war came rolling with Hideyoshi attacking Joseon.
With that out of the way, you do get some interesting stuff out of Chinese; for example, this with regards to the periodic table and Chemistry. As the guy points out, it's arguably more helpful to have the characters representing elements based on radicals (部首) rather than simply trying to imitate the English names, because there's a methodology behind said radicals that makes everything make sense.
Also, I'd like to suggest that the whole sound-emulation thing in relation to English is in fact increasingly becoming a Thing as language interference occurs more frequently between the two languages (list here, for example). Particularly in countries where English might be the primary language, but a multitude of other languages including Chinese are also used, and constantly interfere with one another (e.g. Singapore, where you get a lot of Chinese sound-emulation involving names of places/locations).
On the subject of pinyin, this is what I think: It's like romaji, basically. Great as a learning tool for when you're starting out, but terrible in the long run if/when you let it become too much of a crutch. In the long run, it's vital to transition towards a proper understanding of how the Chinese character categorisation works (i.e. 部首 / radicals). Same with kanji, since it's basically classified the same way.
The more significant difference between Chinese and Japanese, really, is the whole verb thing, which is completely different in Japanese. Studying it at university, a lot of us (even the Chinese) struggle with conjugation, as well as the variety of conjugations involved.
That said, again, I tend to prefer approaching the entire affair as a matter of first principles, i.e. starting at 辞書形 and understanding how to branch out from there. The problem, of course, is that most Japanese language courses start out with the ます stem and move along from there, for various reasons.
Oh, right, one last thing. If there's one thing I'm grateful for regarding Japanese, it's the sheer flexibility of the sentence structure. As an English native speaker, my biggest problem growing up was that damned problem where you subconsciously end up using English sentence structures while writing / speaking in another language (in my case, Chinese, my mother tongue), and it's a problem that remains with me to this day. Well, that, and the fact that I have very little knowledge of 繁体字, because they only taught me 简体 in school. At least Japanese helps with that.
Oh, other last thing, since we're on the subject of languages / linguistics. This book is great. My copy just arrived a few days ago and I highly recommend it if you don't already have it.
The only problem is having to flip between three different character sets on a computer. I should really start memorising those shortcuts....
@panzerfan: Actually, you might be interested in Marius Jansen's book on the relationship between China and the Tokugawa era. I haven't read it myself, but he does touch on the subject briefly in his other book, Japan and Its World (which I do happen to own), and quite compellingly demonstrates that Chinese influence on Japan remained (although it was more or less one-way in the direction of the Japanese) even after the Tokugawa shut out the rest of the world, and while China dealt with internal struggles of its own.
Plus I think Japanese had far less sound shifts compared to Chinese, being a smaller insular country and all.
Oh, they had plenty of sound shifts. Tracing from Old Japanese to Modern shows lots of changes occurring. And if you want to be pedantic, the Kansai-ben use of /ya/ is technically a sound shift from classical /nari/... It's just that the changes were systematic and incremental - much less drastic than Chinese got; the various regions in Japan also changed in different ways - though I still do wonder how the heck Kagoshima-ben got the way it is...
On the translation thing - is it really that hard to just whack it in a Japanese dictionary and do a quick 10 second check to see if it's the same? I mean, really.
panzerfan said:
That's how big the gap is when we go from contemporary to the classics.
God, I hated having to read the Kojiki. I mean, Genji and Makurasoshi were bad enough, but the Kojiki... (and writing on steles...) - Manyougana is a bitch to read; but thus is the life of a Japanese linguistics student. And the further back you go with written Classical Japanese, the more and more it becomes like Classical Chinese - until it's just straight-up kanbun, or in the case of the Kojiki, Classical Chinese with a dash of Old Japanese - I suppose it would have been a little easier if I actually spoke Chinese, though. I never fail to get a kick when Japanese people find out that I can read Classical Japanese, and even more so, Old Japanese (a little, anyway - it's been a while)
Unfortunately, my ability to access the fancy-fancy dictionaries expired when I graduated, or I'd go and look up the history of 慇懃無礼 for you; I could always go to the library at some point.
soloblast said:
The more significant difference between Chinese and Japanese, really, is the whole verb thing, which is completely different in Japanese. Studying it at university, a lot of us (even the Chinese) struggle with conjugation, as well as the variety of conjugations involved.
That said, again, I tend to prefer approaching the entire affair as a matter of first principles, i.e. starting at 辞書形 and understanding how to branch out from there. The problem, of course, is that most Japanese language courses start out with the ます stem and move along from there, for various reasons.
Which is why I firmly believe that university Japanese courses should include a unit (or ten) on Japanese linguistics. It becomes much easier to parse when you know the background (and if you go deep enough, the history) of conjugations and whatnot. But alas, there's not enough lecturers in Japanese linguistics to go around outside of Japan, I guess. And even less that have the will and skill to teach a class of dirty first-year Japanese students.
@panzerfan: Actually, you might be interested in Marius Jansen's book on the relationship between China and the Tokugawa era. I haven't read it myself, but he does touch on the subject briefly in his other book, Japan and Its World (which I do happen to own), and quite compellingly demonstrates that Chinese influence on Japan remained (although it was more or less one-way in the direction of the Japanese) even after the Tokugawa shut out the rest of the world, and while China dealt with internal struggles of its own.
I've been looking at comparative evolution of Joseon, Ming-Manchu and warring period to post Meiji Japan. This would be something I'd want to hear a different opinion of. The trouble with Manchu is the fact that 小中華 would definitely question its legitimacy and we saw that play out with Hong Taiji's subjugation of Joseon for one. I am intrigued with what the Bakufu was thinking as the Sinocentrism waned and waxed till Perry and the Opium war of Daoguang era. Thanks!
you guys keep amazing me with those speeches worthy of a thesis
Tehnryuu, that was...Oh! Zeppelin!Fufu... My new deathblow, that's what!I can't say it...!The 'Kooguhl Shhraibah'!
Ain't it cool?J-Ja...Under the Japanese affectation towards 'reading the atmosphere' and 'being considerate', one must be prudent with their words.