I remember when I first learned the Japanese word for "name" -- which is namae, nah-mah-eh -- I noticed the similarity between the two words and wondered if the Japanese could have borrowed theirs from some Western language. It turns out that this isn't the case, and the parallel between the two is purely accidental, a surprisingly common occurrence that's known as a "false cognate" in linguistics. In Japanese you thank someone by saying arigato, which is very similar to the Portuguese for the same phrase, obrigado, but this is another example of unrelated words accidentally having similar pronunciations. Or the word so, which by an amazing coincidence corresponds perfectly with the word "so" in English as in so desu ka? "is that so?" Often words have pronunciations that are slightly shifted but still close, like boya which means "boy," hone (ho-ne) which means "bone," and the Japanese word for road, which is doro, phonetically the exact opposite of the English word.
The word for "bone" in Japanese is hone, which as in sebone (se-bo-ne) or backbone.
8 comments:
You forget your long vowels too :)
I went slightly "huh?" at doro which I just read as 泥 and not 道路, then I read it again and figured out what you meant
"ne", at the end of sentences, has the same meaning both in Italian(at least in the northern part of Italy) and in Japanese. I always thought this was soooo cool.
A very interesting entry as usual, Peter-san ^^/
Redbeard, yes I often remove the long vowels to remove the confusion for non-Japanese readers. Dohro/douro would be more accurate but since no American would differentiate between them, I usually simplify it. Hence, arigato instead of arigatou, etc.
Kenshin, that's a good one.
I didn't know about the 'ne' in northern Italy, it might be a germanic influence for that region, since 'ne' has the same meaning in german.
the thing about arigatou/obrigado is still a topic for discussion. there are liguitics that agree, and there are those who don't.
all portuguese words imported to the japanese language have suffered some kind of phonetic transformation and many are also written in kanji because they were mostly imported in the 16th century.
so, it's a very different linguistic job to do such comparisons between portuguese imported words or english/german words that were imported some 3 centuries later.
Germans and Japanese use "ah sou!"/"Ach so!" in the same way, too
However that is casual language so you can't define exactly where it came from.
If you go far enough back in time, like say to the Tower of Babel (true story, y'know), there used to be one common language on earth (probably some pre-Hebrew thing. Ever notice the similarities between certain Hebrew and Japanese letters?). All of these little "hints" are not just coincidence.
Lenny
Yes, Lazergold, interesting comment. It's all related on some level. One of the comments I was reading about false cognates was whether "namae" and "name" were really related. One school was that, yes, if you go back to a hypothesized proto-language group, they'd be linked. I rejected this though, since anyway, English is so recent as far as Japan is concerned, having had so many centuries with Portuguese/Spanish.
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