Japanese lexical influence on other East Asian languages
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More Julesy:
Why 50% of modern Chinese vocabulary was made in Japan
She says that the flood of Japanese words that inundated China during the last century and more has finally begun to recede and that the Chinese are starting to create their own words for new ideas, concepts, and things. It would be good to know what some of these are and whether they are seeping into the vocabularies of Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Singapore.
Selected readings
- "Massive borrowing" (2/18/19)
- "Japanese borrowings and reborrowings" (4/20/24)
- "'And the greatest Japanese export to China is…'" (8/21/12) — and the comments thereto for an interesting discussion boncerning it
- "Sino-Nipponica" (7/26/15)
- "Too many recent Japanese loanwords in English?" (7/17/13)
- "Etymologizing and fantasizing: economy and relish" (2/26/22)
- Victor H. Mair, "East Asian Round-Trip Words," Sino-Platonic Papers, 34 (October, 1992)
Han said,
July 23, 2025 @ 9:05 pm
Wonder if head-last compounds borrowed from Japan and China were reversed in head-first, SVO language like Vietnamese.
Thomas said,
July 23, 2025 @ 11:45 pm
This topic is so fascinating. I was so surprised that even the suffixes -化 and -性 are originally Japanese. All of this begs the question how the common Chinese people even talked before these lexical imports.
But how does one conclude that so-and-so percent of Korean vocabulary stem from Chinese? Does this include words such as 역사 (历史), that were probably introduced by the Japanese in colonial times? I don't trust the statistics.
cliff arroyo said,
July 24, 2025 @ 2:52 am
"Wonder if head-last compounds borrowed from Japan and China were reversed in head-first, SVO language like Vietnamese"
Most weren't but some were… IIRC William Hannas in 'Asia's Orthographic Dilemma' (1997) gave that as one reason that romanization was successful in Vietnam (not a main reason but a contributing factor).
Lasius said,
July 24, 2025 @ 3:10 am
When explaining the suffixes she states Enlish -ize or -ability as the "English originals". But wouldn't Japanese more likely have calqued them from Dutch or German?
Bob Ladd said,
July 24, 2025 @ 6:20 am
@Lasius: I think her examples with -ize and -ability are simply examples of the kinds of words for which the Japanese created new combinations of hanzi/kanji, with no necessary implication that these are direct calques based consistently on correspondences with any European source. The coinage for "possibility" could just as well have been based on "Möglichkeit" without constraining other coinages that used the same character to convey the fairly abstract meaning of "property of being [Adjective]".
AntC said,
July 24, 2025 @ 7:44 am
Thank you again Julesy for an excellent clear explication.
Translating Western concepts via Japanese sounds about as hazardous as translating the Old Testament via Greek or from Latin-via-Greek.
I'm kinda surprised Classical Chinese didn't have many of these civilisation-oriented concepts already??
Lasius said,
July 24, 2025 @ 8:09 am
@Bob Ladd.
I agree. This is why I took exception at the wording: "English original".
Stephen Goranson said,
July 24, 2025 @ 8:45 am
boncerning –> concerning (?)
Bob Ladd said,
July 24, 2025 @ 9:06 am
@Lasius: OK, that makes sense.
Victor Mair said,
July 24, 2025 @ 9:56 am
@AntC
"I'm kinda surprised Classical Chinese didn't have many of these civilisation-oriented concepts already??"
That's a worthy question.
Classical Chinese operates within a wholly different mindset from IE languages and alphabetic scripts; their epistemological and ontological frameworks are quite dissimilar. That's why the Japanese created the Wasei kango 和製漢語 ("Japanese-made Chinese words) tetsugaku 哲学 for “philosophy” > MSM zhéxué.
=====
哲 (tetsu, “clear, wise, sage”) + 学 (gaku, “study”). Coined by Nishi Amane in his 1874 百一新論 as a translation of English philosophy or Dutch filosofie. Nishi's kanji spelling 希哲學 (hirosohi) is literally calqued from Ancient Greek φιλοσοφία (philosophía, “pursuit of wisdom”, literally “love of knowledge”), apparently from the Chinese morphemes 希 (xī, “to long for”) and 哲 (zhé, “wisdom”), before he later settled with 哲學 (modernly spelt 哲学).[1]
Nishi also used the transcriptions ヒロソヒ, ヒロソヒー (hirosohī) and 斐鹵蘇比.[1]
(Wiktionary)
=====
And so on and so forth for hundreds of other modern intellectual concepts and scientific terms.
Julesy gets it.
jin defang said,
July 24, 2025 @ 10:52 am
and don't forget Arthur Waldron's "The Warlord…: American Historical Review October 1991, pp. 1073-1100 in which he traces the migration of Japanese military terminology into Chinese.
Coby said,
July 24, 2025 @ 12:10 pm
The adoption of Japanese-formed Chinese compounds by Chinese is similar to that of Western-formed Greek compounds by Modern Greek, as for example φωτογραφία (photography), ψυχολογία (psychology). However, Westerners (especially the French) also formed many Greek-Latin hybrids, such as sociology and automobile, and those had to be changed to all-Greek before being adopted (κοινωνιολογία, αυτοκίνητο).
I believe that there are Chinese-Japanese compounds in Japanese, and I wonder if any of them have been taken up in Chinese.
Josh R. said,
July 24, 2025 @ 6:44 pm
If I may add an entry for Selected Readings, Prof. Mair previously wrote about the tremendous turn-of-the-century translation projects in Japan that created so many of these words that were later imported to China.
The transformative power of translation
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=65111
Josh R. said,
July 24, 2025 @ 7:45 pm
Having watched the video, there's one part where Julesy suggests that Chinese 浪漫 (langman, "romantic") was translated into Chinese from Japanese ロマンチック (romanchikku). I'm not sure it was really clear what happened.
Essentially, "Romanticism," the artistic and intellectual movement, was translated into Japanese as ロマン主義 (roman-shugi, with roman coming French "romant", and shugi being the suffix coined for "-ism"). As often happens in abbreviation-happy Japanese, the shugi suffix soon came to be dropped, with ロマン by itself serving to represent the concept. In 1907, famed author Natsume Soseki coined 浪漫 (rouman) as a picturesque way to write ロマン, and this is the word that got imported to China.