Perhaps I should elaborate on exactly what I mean.
It’s not that I don’t think and understanding of certain things is helpful, because it is. Also, a lot of the etymology is (in my opinion) really interesting and (more rarely) useful.
Rather, what I mean is this:
A lot of new language learners ask a lot of the same questions, and the particular question that I think is a poor question is not “why is like this?” but rather “why is it like this, instead of like this?”
Because in that case, the best answer is often “because it is.”
New learners often ask “why don’t we read it this way?” or “why don’t we use this grammar to mean this instead?” or “why is this word rude?” or etc.
I don’t think these questions are 100% not worth asking, but I do think that it’s helpful to realize that for most of these, the answer is that language is ultimately arbitrary and that’s how things shake out.
Like, I could say that やしろおさ seems weird because やしろ from 社 only really relates to actual shrine thingies inhabited by gods, but that in itself is arbitrary too. The only real answer is that’s just not a word because it isn’t. At the end of the day, in 2021, that’s just how things have ended up. In a parallel world, 社長 might very well could have been やしろおさ.
It just isn’t.
The Japanese word 兄 means older brother. English doesn’t have a single word for this. Are older brothers rare? Words are coined when their use is needed, not when the thing they describe is discovered. In English speaking cultures, familial seniority within the same generation has never been important so there was no point in coining a single word which encodes that information. Actually there’s one type of sibling seniority which (historically) was extremely significant… and English has a word for that: firstborn.
For the same reason “automobile” isn’t “selfcanmove”. Japanese isn’t a conlang. Languages are part of the real, messy, disgusting world. Just like English imported the Latin script, and a deluge of Latin morphemes, Japanese imported the Chinese script and a deluge of Chinese morphemes. When coining a word for an expression that doesn’t have one, the choices are basically to either pull from old foreign morphemes, or smash words together.
The word for America is 米国. It’s the Chinese root morphemes and Kanji for “rice” and “country/land/place”. If we were to coin a similar sounding term in English it would probably be “Agricultaria”. That works just fine, it sounds nice and conveys all the meaning of a foreign land which is also a breadbasket. Now if the word were instead formed with Kun’yomi it would be 米国. That’s literally just “Rice Country.” It sounds awkward as all hell and doesn’t carry as much meaning. Most importantly the fundamental meaning of this is different. As a foreigner without that preexisting context it just seems arbitrary but it absolutely isn’t.
Yeah, sometimes you can glean valuable information (like, “why is it “cow” when they’re on the farm, but “beef” when it’s on a plate?” - because the commoners, who were farming the animals, spoke English, while the nobles, who were eating the meat, spoke French), but often “because etymology” is the only possible answer.
I tried to give myself an all Germanic, no Latin challenge on “selfcanmove” which ruled out “able”. But there’s so much Latin in English now that I still failed, which I think makes the point even clearer. It’s difficult not to use foreign morphemes to make new words at this point. It should be “selfcango”.
I guess you’ll have to look into the historical and cultural context of that time. Remember that ideas are imported not just words. Maybe the imported word, along with its context, expressed better what they wanted to say.
I know that you are mostly referring to Kanji and how they come up with the reading, but hehe I guess I am just trying to help. May be seeing it another way will help you.
English is seen in all languages for example: “crowd funding” you see it in German, Italian and Spanish without a change whatsoever. It’s just an idea that doesn’t exist in the language. I’ve heard Germans say “getriggered” (Germans add ge- for the past perfect) which is triggered.
Some words are just cooler. I’ve heard Italians use “date” (as in going in/having a date). And it’s not like they are unromantic and never had a date before. Similar thing with “job” in German, but they even went further and made it into a verb too: jobben(I know wtf). It’s not like Germans were unemployed before, if anything Germans have better unemployment rates than us.
Funny thing is that the Japanese took アルバイト from the Germans which is Arbeit or job. To be honest I don’t know what happened there. May be it reveals something about our psyche and a universal dislike of our work. So we use other languages to make it cooler.
It would be nice to have some input from @Jonapedia here as well.
I was once curious about the roots of Japanese and how far back it goes until it becomes something else and I found a couple of videos, including this one which to me was a bit of an eyeopener:
You’d basically have Chinese characters (shown in a video I can’t find anymore, sadly) + pronunciation which is not Chinese anymore, but not yet modern Japanese and contains a lot of sounds not typical of modern Japanese. I discussed this with a friend from Hongkong and to him the sequence of Chinese characters was completely random and incomprehensible.
The language would then slowly form itself, incorporate additional scripts like Hiragana and Katakana until it’s what it is today.
I wouldn’t say the on’yomi sounds are strictly Chinese either, since they only vaguely resemble Chinese and lack a lot of nuance. The kun’yomi readings, according to Wikipedia, look like an attempt to combine concepts known and named before with the Chinese writing system and would probably explain why a lot of standalone characters use kun’yomi. Not all of them, because some didn’t have a native Japanese equivalent and the modified Chinese reading (on’yomi) was adopted.
No clue why many compound words use on’yomi. Because these terms didn’t exist before or didn’t have a proper name?
I think 車 (くるま) is a nice example as well. In the past it could’ve literally been “this thing with wheels”, but anything that has wheels in it will have the reading しゃ, because that’s the “actual” adopted reading of that character.
For my money this is exactly the mechanism that makes language wonderful.
They aren’t discreet systems, they’re living breathing people talking to each other over years and years and years, so of course they affect each other and bleed together and grow. To treat any language like a single whole where you can draw a coherent line between foreign and not foreign is ultimately the same problem as treating a nation as a monolith, when it’s anything but. Chinese-derived words in Japanese are no less Japanese than a Japanese person with Chinese ancestry in their background would be.
I think rather than try to imagine an English without a “beef” or “avant-garde” or “octopi” etc. or a Japanese without onyomi, or ググる, or its writing system, it’s better to just appreciate the bounty that we do have! Countless fascinating words with fascinating backgrounds!
It may be hard to imagine English without “octopi” but the funny thing is that the correct plural form of “octopus” is “octopuses”. Ending -i is a characteristic of Latin words, while octopus is Greek.
Thank god! I finally have confirmation of what the plural of octopus is!
In all seriousness though, it does kinda suck that we lost so much linguistic information and history just because so much stuff wasn’t written down and fell out of favor… especially with older languages like Chinese.
I like crossing the lines of language roots like that (same as why I picked ググる as an example too). I think it’s cool that language rules are applicable and intelligible like that even when they wouldn’t make sense in the language they were derived from. It might be incorrect from a latin/greek perspective, but plenty of English speakers have thought it was correct through the years, and all three alternatives (counting “octopodes”) are pretty understandable to them all. That’s the kind of mess of languages crashing together I think should be celebrated!
(even if in this case the word mostly just comes up in conversations about those roots and what’s correct or not, so it’s too distracting to be really useful…)
Weird, this has only happened for me on this forum (and the only languages I have installed on my PC are English and Japanese)
Apparently Chrome removed the menu to choose encoding from in 2016, but I found a chrome extension (部分強制メイリオちゃん) to change it, and that seems to have fixed the problem for me. It must have been either Chinese or Korean encoding, thanks!
I kinda felt like I shouldn’t step in. I’m sure that the reasons for importing Chinese readings are numerous and complex, and honestly we could ask the same questions about English: why did so much of native English vocabulary get replaced by words with Latin and French roots? Looking at works like Beowulf, we realise that so much of English has simply been lost to history. I’d say that some very simple possibilities might be:
Chinese compounds were a little more efficient because they generally contained fewer morae/syllables, which might have made them more convenient to use
Chinese was something like the Latin of the East, and China was a regional hegemon. It’s fairly likely that many complex ideas were only available in Chinese at the time, and that, even if Japanese equivalents existed for the component ideas, it was perhaps easier to simply import the combinations that already existed in Chinese. It might also have made users of on’yomi seem more erudite: kanji were apparently brought over by Japanese scholars and by monks, after all. Another thing might have been the utility of Chinese as a common language in the region: both Japan and Korea’s oldest documents are written in Classical Chinese, and country-specific terms aside, a Chinese speaker proficient in Classical Chinese can easily read them.
Japan imported at least some of the Chinese political and legal system, if I’m not wrong, which might have influenced certain word choices. I believe Buddhism was also imported from China.
However, well, there probably were other factors, so I certainly won’t claim to have the last word.
Perhaps, but Chinese pronunciation has changed a lot over time, and in actual fact, if you look at Chinese dialects other than Mandarin, you see a lot more similarities between Japanese on’yomi and Chinese pronunciation. Many dialects still retain end consonants that Mandarin got rid of ages ago. Part of why on’yomi don’t scare me is that I’m used to looking for ways to extrapolate equivalences between words in Chinese dialects (like those of my grandparents) and Mandarin. I can apply the same strategies to Japanese on’yomi.
I don’t think that’s the only reason. There might also be an issue of clarity: I believe that 車 (as a kanji) generally refers to a vehicle. The word くるま, however, can also simply mean ‘wheel’. I think importing kanji allowed Japanese to fix or attach certain meanings to particular symbols and words, possibly more so than it would have without a writing system. For that matter, I have to say that I’m quite amazed at how well certain adopted kanji match all the nuances of a given Japanese word, since many of the same nuances exist in Chinese as well, and I sometimes wonder if it’s a result of culture similarities or simply an after effect of adopting kanji.
That’s because what you showed him was probably the 万葉集, which used 万葉仮名 aka the predecessors of modern kana. At the time, kanji were used both for the meanings and for their sounds, and even if it seems that certain kanji were more commonly used for their sounds than their meanings, there wasn’t really just one kanji per sound, as is the case with kana today. There was a system of sorts, but it wasn’t as standardised as what we have today, which is part of why ‘hentaigana’ exist outside the modern standardised kana system. If you knew Japanese grammar and which kanji were being used as kana though, you’d probably be able to read it, albeit with some difficulty because they might not have had an equivalent of okurigana at the time.
As for the video you posted… if you know some Classical Japanese grammar along with sound conversion rules (e.g. ti=chi, si=shi, and most importantly, the fact that the H row used to be the P row, and that it was also a W row of sorts at some point in history, if my memory serves me) and changes in spelling conventions (the ones that date from the last spelling reform, after which hiragana took the place of katakana in okurigana), you can actually read the text. Not all of it, perhaps, but quite a bit. Here’s the first poem, for example:
秋の田の仮庵の庵の苫を粗み、我が衣手は露に濡れつつ。
I needed to check the dictionary to find words that made sense and to be sure that my text was right (which I think it is, after a quick look, but you should probably paste it in Google just to be sure, since these things have definitely been recorded and translated by experts), but you can convert almost everything:
aki no ta no kariho no iho no toma wo arami, waga koromode ha tsuyu ni nure tsutsu
Poem 5 as another example:
奥山に紅葉踏み分け、鳴く鹿の声を聞く時ぞ秋は悲しき。
okuyama ni momiji fumiwake, naku shika no koe wo kiku toki zo aki ha kanashiki
It’s mostly old grammar, including the use of ぞ for emphasis, almost like a strong は or a こそ, and not simply for sounding manly, and the old sentence-final adjective endings like き instead of い. It’s fundamentally still the same language today, except that many of the helper verbs have changed or been replaced, along with verb and adjective endings.
Forgive me for jumping back so far in the thread, but isn’t 米国 specifically a descendent of an ateji term for America? There’s probably some fascinating linguistic history with Japanese exonyms.
That’s why I picked it!