The Adventure of English
If you've been reading my twitter feed lately, you might have noticed me writing about an interesting BBC documentary I'd come across. Called The Adventure of English, the 8-part series follows the evolution of the English language from its early Anglo-Saxon roots, through centuries of refinement by the likes of Chaucer and Shakespeare, and finally to its arrival as England's most famous export to the world during the Colonial Era. For a "language otaku" like myself, the show was awesome linguistic pr0n, and I loved every episode. One of the themes of English is how it was changed by other languages it came into contact with, especially after the Norman Invasion, which led to 300 years of rule by French-speaking kings and is the reason 50% of modern English words are French in origin. This mirrors another island nation I'm fond of. Japan also had a linguistic "invasion" in the form of kanji from China around the 6th century AD, which the Japanese adapted to their spoken language. Today, every kanji used in Japan has two basic readings, a Japanese one for the simpler concepts like mizu for "water" or sora for "sky," and a Chinese reading that's used to create more complex compound words such as suiso for "hydrogen" or and kuuatsu for "air pressure."
I enjoyed the BBC documentary on the history of English, but then I'm a "language otaku."
posted by Peter in Japan at 8:02 PM
4 Comments:
Old wisecrack: "I speak 20 languages, all of them in English!"
To get to a 50% romance-origin figure I think you would need to count words that were directly imported from Latin as well as words that were taken from Latin by way of French.
12:27 AM
Something I've been wondering about for the longest time is the Chinese reading of kanji in Japanese. To me the on reading of a kanji sounds very much like Japanese sounds and not at all how I think Chinese sounds like. Are the Chinese readings still the same in China and Japan or did they split apart a little bit during the course of the history?
12:30 AM
My understanding: the "Chinese" readings of Japanese kanji are based on the Classical Chinese pronunciations of the characters (not their modern Mandarin pronunciations) and are entirely conformed to Japanese phonology. No tones, for example.
I expect Peter will be along shortly to qualify or refute this statement.
12:37 AM
Mockingbird, yes, I know it's a difficult number to quantify, since some words appeared and we're not sure where which route we took. I learned 50% in college but looking online there was a lot of variation. It's kind of funny, in a way -- it seems like Brits want to lower this number as much as possible, which sounds a lot like Koreans and Japanese deciding not to press the issue of "are Koreans and Japanese related by blood?" ^_^
Matte, first of all the Chinese readings are based on what was in use thousands of years ago, so yes, they can be quite off. Also, they were put through the katanana syllabilizer so they often isn't connection anymore. Still, 2 and 4 kanji words will often be as close in pronunciation as similar English/French words in practice. For example, "keitai denwa" is cell phone in Japanese, and the same word in Chinese too, just inflected differently. I could understand the word if I heard it, but of course nothing around the word since I don't speak Chinese.
Mockingbird, my understanding is that everything is tied to the classical Chinese, and all of the simplified kanji (and pronunciations, if they revised those too, not sure) are not used at all. So it's like they took a snapshot of the 6th century and everything diverged from there. Phonology did likely change things to the point where, were I to learn Chinese now, I'd have a useful hook to memorize the new pronunciations, but they'd all be new and different. No tones is right, there's (almost) no tones in Japanese at all, and I could give every Japanese person a big wet kiss because of that ^_^
1:25 AM
Post a Comment
<< Home