Question:
Someone told me years ago that (mandarin?)Chinese and Japanese are written with largely the same set of characters, but completely different spoken meanings. Does this bear any resemblance to the truth?
I'll try to keep this answer short :-)
Most languages of the Far East have their roots in Chinese, in much the
same way that most languages of Europe have some connection to Greek
and/or Latin.
Over the many thousands of years the spoken languages of the Far East
have adapted and changed such that there is now little resemblance to
the original. However, the written systems, although having had changes,
still have some similarities.
Imagine Chinese characters as, say, Arabic numerals or maybe
mathematical signs. If you see the number 4, you know it as four, or
quatre, or vier or quatros or whatever and you could travel to, say,
Poland or Bulgaria and if you saw the figure 4 you may not know how to
pronounce it, but you would understand what someone was trying to convey
if they wrote 4 on a piece of paper. The same goes for, say, the plus,
minus multiply and divided sign in maths. At airports you see "?"
meaning the information desk and, of course, the figures for Ladies and
Gents are universal. Chinese characters work in the same way (more or
less) in the Far East.
I remember once as a tender 19 year old being in some dreadful place in
South Korea[1]. The food was especially spicy and water was desperately
needed. Neither myself or my travelling pal knew any Korean, but we
wrote down the Chinese character for water and received a large jugful
of the stuff. As a result, twenty minutes later we were busting for a
pee. Once more, out came the pen and paper and we wrote down the Chinese
character for a man and we were shown the way to the Gents... thank
heavens! The mind boggles at what the waitress might have thought! The
scope for a misunderstanding was something I hadn't appreciated at the
time!
Of course, things are never quite that simple. Since WW2, (indeed, as a
direct consequence of it) the Japanese have reduced the number of
characters required to read a newspaper to less than 2,000 (1,800 I
believe) whereas Chinese will use many times that number. I suspect a
Japanese who picked up The People's Daily would only have a very rough
idea of what the stories were about, and a Chinese who tried to read the
Yomiuri Shimbun would be similarly confused.
To complicate matters, Japanese has four "alphabets" in current usage.
One is the Western alphabet, another is the aforementioned 1800 Chinese
characters and then there are two phonetic alphabets. One of these
phonetic alphabets (katakana) is used to write foreign words (things
like "radio", "ice cream", "piano", "coffee", "internet" that kind of
stuff). The other alphabet (hiragana) is used primarily to show
grammatical endings to the Chinese character which is used as the root.
For example, take the root "beaut...". The character for beaut will be
used and then added to it will be -y, -iful, -ifully, -eous in
hiragana... you get the idea. Thus the Chinese character will be used in
conjunction with hiragana, which in turn means a Chinese could not fully
understand written Japanese.
As for pronunciation... very different but not completely so. In the
Japanese language, most Chinese characters have a Japanese pronunciation
when used alone, but when used in a compound they revert to Chinese or
something not to far from it. Thus East is "higashi" and North is
"kita", but North-East is "tohoku".
[1] South Korea is quite a useful example of a country which has adapted
Chinese characters into a much simpler written form. As I understand it,
their alphabet, called hangul (which means "Korean letters"), has 15 (or
is it 16?) characters, is regarded by linguists as the most scientific
writing system there is. It was developed in 1443 by the Hall of
Talented Scholars under the leadership of King Sejong. (Goodness! How
all this stuff has stuck in my mind!)
I don't know about Japanese vs Chinese, but I do know that different
dialects of Chinese use the same written form, but different spoken
forms. That's why you sometimes get a film with Chinese dialogue and Chinese
sub-titles !
I shall have to go to the pee cee to get the actual number of languages
spoken on mainland China as distinct to the dialects. All Chinese readers
from the diaspora would be able to read the characters in their own
languages if they've been taught to read them.
Chinese too has more than one form. Mao started a system of simplifying
things (pinyin) and that is how all the names got changed: eg
Peking/Beijing. Mao Tsetung/Mao Zedong. I have to keep getting people to
write down what they're saying because I can't relate spellings to
pronunciations.
Last updated
February 16th 2004
Back to Encyclopaedia Umratica page
Back to Umra page
Back to Home page:
