Are Chinese Japanese & Korean Related?

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SOURCES & FURTHER READING

[JJMcCullough]

People often note that katakana is used for foreign words, but what’s less often mentioned is how it’s used for made-up words, too. Like all the Japanese Pokémon names are katakana.

[hongdalai]

The character【火】

in Mandarin Chinese: huo
in Japanese: borrowed:か/くゎ(ka/kwa) native:ひ(hi)
in Korean: borrowed:화(hwa) native: 불(bul)
in Vietnamese: borrowed: hỏa native: lửa

The analogy is like there is an inherent Germanic word “fire” in English, however if you need to create a proper noun about fire, you need to use the Latin word “ignis” to create the vocabulary, such as ignition, ignatius…. etc.

[MichaelSidneyTimpson]

You got some things quite wrong. The words you used for fire were ALL borrowed from Chinese, that's why they sounded similar. For example, the NATIVE word for fire in Korean is 불 "Bul". They don't use Hanja for Korean words, only for borrowed Chinese words. About 60% of Korean vocabulary is borrowed from Chinese, and only that (in the modern day) can be written in Hanja, whereas all native Korean words can ONLY be written in Hangeul (for modern usage). And Japanese uses Kanji for both Chinese borrowed words (like the one you said, it is a borrowed word) and for native words. However, there is another twist to this, there IS a history of borrowing Chinese characters for the sound only of the Chinese word, and using it for the native word, which would mean something completely different. While Korea abandoned this use long ago, there are many words in Japanese that were written this way, meaning that the character does not maintain the same meaning in those cases. So the MAIN way which these languages have relation is that they all borrowed words from Chinese into their language. The pronunciation of these words reflect the time and dialect or language of Chinese they were in contact with at the time and that, along with the pronunciation and lack of tones in their language is what causes them to sound different from modern Mandarin (because they mostly were not borrowed from Mandarin nor modern Chinese). Nearly all the native words in Japanese and Korean sound nothing like the Chinese words (like with different consonants, vowels, more syllables, etc). And of course, Japanese and Korean grammar is COMPLETELY different from Chinese, so sentences would be constructed differently (at least in modern usage). Finally, the characters were also changed through history, so, even when using modern Chinese characters (the traditional ones used in Taiwan--the simplified ones in PRC are VERY different), they do not all look the same exactly as the ones that exist in Japanese and Korean.

[bjkrz]

King Sejong didn't merely *decree* that a new writing system should be made. He was a scholar, and is largely credit as developing the script himself.

[Warpwaffel]

Nowadays Vietnamese mostly uses chữ Quốc Ngữ a script based on Latin script.

[Illjwamh]

One thing you didn't mention is that when the Chinese characters were imported, the Chinese pronunciation of a lot of them (or a localized approximation, anyway) was imported too. Japanese has what's called "on-yomi" and "kun-yomi", or "Chinese reading" and "Japanese reading" respectively. The Chinese reading will often be used in multi-character compound words (like "kanji", for instance) and specialized concepts, much the way we in English will use Latin and Greek roots to build new words, like "telephone". Korean is similar, which is why if you speak one language, you can sometimes get the gist of what someone using the other is saying, since they're using the same Old Chinese roots for some of their vocabulary.

[trien]

They are not related but Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese borrowed a lot of Chinese vocabulary plus Japanese and Korean borrowed some vocabulary from each other.

[hoangkimviet]

Actually, in Vietnamese, you can call Chinese characters “Hán tự” as well. Well, does it seems similar to “Hanzi”, “Kanji” and “Hanja”?

As a Vietnamese, I can explain why Vietnamese no longer use Chinese characters. The reason is Vietnamese does not have as many homophones as Chinese and Japanese. Therefore, we can use the Latin script easily and effectively, whereas Chinese and Japanese have to maintain the existence of Chinese characters.

[hueskylord]

0:17 How did all of Thailand get under Water?

[SpenserLi]

The pronunciation difference of 火 was a bad example cos it actually just represents difference sound shifts these 3 languages went through over the couple thousands of years.

[davidnaranja]

What confuses me is that while I do not understand Korean or Japanese at all, I swear I have heard similar words when I watch their media (subtitled), like for example the word for "promise".

[Akaykimuy]

thanks for not forgetting about Vietnamese at the end

[PandaBear]

My daughter took Japanese as her foreign language in college and one of her classmates had lived in Japan. This classmate said what was being taught would not enable them to converse in Japan even though they were learning all three writing systems. Since she took that course I always wondering if someone spoke Kanji if they could converse with someone on mainland China and now I know.

[RoccosVideos]

Korean doesn't use characters when writing. Korean is written in Hangul which is an alphabetic writing system.

[deanzaZZR]

Kind of barely touched upon but Classical Chinese was the lingua franca of East Asia for 2, 000 years. This is how China, Korea, Japan (and Vietnam) communicated with one another. In fact when Commodore Mathew Perry showed up in Edo Bay in 1853 the documents provided to the Japanese were written in Classical Chinese by Chinese scholars and the Japanese responded in kind.

[tobfos]

10:03 that's spelt 'Chữ Hán' which just means 汉字 (Hàn Zì). However this hasn't been used for centuries, instead 'Chữ Nôm' was used. A Chinese script designed specifically for the Vietnamese language. Neither of these are in use anymore, as Chữ Quốc Ngữ (National Script) is now used, this is just the latin characters. The vast majority of Vietnamese these days can't read Chinese characters, and it's not taught in schools anymore.

[five-toedslothbear]

5:13 they might be the same for various meanings of “same“. Chinese and Japanese simplified their Chinese characters independently and in two different ways and at two different times. So while simple characters like 火 might be the same, complicated characters are often not.

[fattiger]

Not that many Vietnamese know how to use Chinese characters. My mom is from the (pre-communist) south and she never learned how to use the. Maybe it is more common in the north where they have more influence from the Chinese and maybe it was taught more throughout the country after the war.

I understand Chinese characters used to be the writing system of Vietnam, but a new writing system was created during the French colonial era. That's why modern Vietnamese is just roman characters with a bunch of accents.

[lekhakaananta]

There's this sophomoric "um ackshually" in linguistic videos where they're like: "Japanese is just as related to Korean and Chinese as it is to German or Hungarian, as they are not related at all"

This is very misleading for a introductory video, which this video must be, because it is nowhere close to the quality of the standard youtube linguistics video.

These languages are not "related" in the technical, linguistics scholarship sense of a genealogical relations; that is they are not descended from a known common ancestor. In this technical definition, no matter how many borrowings and loanwords you use, you can never make one language related to another language if they didn't start off genealogically related.

But when normal people use the word "related", they don't only mean the narrow genealogical sense. If you use the colloquial sense of the word "related", then saying Japanese is just as related to Chinese as it is to Hungarian is clearly nonsense. They didn't limit their inter-cultural influence to just the writing system, obviously, and even just through the writing system, a lot of loan words, compound words, pronunciations and abstract concepts were borrowed along as well. You cannot deny that they're more similar to each other than to some random European language, regardless of genealogical technicalities.

[UbermanNullist]

The thing that U.S & Europeans often forget when comparing East Asian similarities is this: East Asia has been using Chinese ideograms for over 3000 years. Once you start using ideograms, the sound changes completely and it's no longer possible to trace the origin vocabulary by pronunciation.
This makes the Indo-European language model theory of tracing origins completely useless. pronunciation doesn't matter at all in ideographs.