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To: RealMuLan who wrote (5735)	5/6/2004 2:03:27 PM
From: Wyätt Gwyön	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 116555

Japanese language originated from China somewhere around 2000 years ago sorry, but that is a myth. if you study historical linguistics you will see there are these things called language families, and Japanese/Korean are not in the same family as Chinese. I read old Japanese book and can understand most of them that is because many old Japanese books were written in Chinese! similar to the way educated Englishmen wrote books in Latin a few hundred years ago. as for modern Japanese, sure you can read headlines and pick out individual words, but you would have no clue as to the grammar because it is the opposite word order, and of course Chinese lacks all inflections found in Japanese. there is not even any way to put the inflections and so on into Chinese. Japanese and Chinese are about as close as Chinese and English (actually Chinese and English are syntactically more similar). the use of Chinese characters in Japanese is simply a historical accident--they were imported and superimposed on the native language. we in America would probably use Chinese characters if the Chinese had conquered England in 1066 instead of the Normans. and then people in China would be saying that the English language originated in China a few thousand years ago. one of the easy ways to tell how closely languages are related is to look at the average capabilities of different groups of foreign speakers. for example, German and Dutch speakers of English are on average MUCH better at English than native speakers of non-European languages. in the same manner, Korean speakers are on average MUCH better speakers of Japanese than native speakers of any other language. in my experience Chinese speakers of Japanese are no better at Japanese than are native English speakers (except that they of course have a much easier time learning the Kanji). Japanese and Korean are obviously related to each other--obvious, that is, to people who study or know both languges. but due to hatred between the two countries, they both maintain the myth that they are unrelated. i often have to hold my tongue in the presence of Asians because they swallow these sorts of myths hook, line and sinker. for example, in Korea i was told that Chinese originated from Korea, as did the Buddha and Jesus Christ. i was told this by the head monk at a famous monastery. the Japanese, for their part, have all sorts of nationalistic myths, leading to "Nihonjin-ron" (Theory of the Japanese) in the 80s--they believed, for example, that Japanese people are quiet during rock concerts due to their superfine sense of hearing. That is true, plus difference among 200+ dialects, it is pretty complicated the use of the term "dialect" in China to describe what are distinct and mutually unintelligible languages is a form of propaganda. the leaders fear that if different languages are recognized, then different groups may want to be independent. in the West, these sorts of "dialects" have names like German, English, and Dutch. and of course they have political independence--which the Chinese do not want their ethnic minorities to have. guess you are right. I have some American friends who have learned 20+ years of Chinese, and have lived in China for quite a few years still cannot get hold of the four tones after puberty, it's not really a matter of how much exposure one has to a foreign language, but how receptive one's brain is. so there's a lot of individual variation. one finds the same thing in any country. but the tonal system does seem to be radically different from the typical phonological differences, so perhaps it really does impose a greater barrier. i have never read any studies on this, but eventually i guess i will have to experience it myself to see. Plenty of Chinese characters are Duo Yin Zi (a character can be read a couple of ways, and thus has dif. meaning in each). this does not surprise me. but my point is that in Japanese most characters have MANY readings, like at least two or three, and maybe eight or ten or fifteen, for individual characters. i doubt this situation exists in Chinese. part of it is due to importing the same character more than once, during different Chinese dynasties or from different "dialects", so the Japanized pronunciations are different. and then of course there are multiple native-Japanese readings for the same. basically there's a lot of idiosyncratic arbitrariness, similar to English spelling, except the arbitrariness is multiplied across thousands of Chinese characters and a 48-character phonetic syllabary (Hiragana), instead of the 26 letters of the alphabet.