Amazing Languages: Chinese and Japanese 2020/1/12

Chinese and Japanese are two historic-linking languages. Buddhism and philosophy break the geographic boundary in the 4th to 5th centuries. As a result, lots of Chinese characters introduced into Japan were based on Confusion philosophy and later developed into writing forms in Japanese, which are called“kanji” nowadays. On the contrary, “hanzi” is a writing system used in Chinese in Taiwan, China and Hong Kong. Although the pronunciation of these two systems are similar, however, both language systems are not the same. In fact, Chinese and Japanese stand for different language systems. Basically, three different points are worth our attentions: phonology, inflection, and sentence structure.

First of all, the importance of phonology, a branch of linguistics study that explains sounds and meanings in languages, plays different roles in Chinese and Japanese. In Chinese, the four tones, such as level and oblique sound, affect word meanings a lot if we adjust the pitch of words. For example, Chinese characters “媽” ”麻” “馬” “罵” is likewise “Ma” sound. The pitch, however, are produced differently and affect word meaning. We called Chinese language with such features “tonal language” in phonology study. On the contrary, the change of accent in Japanese is associated with their dialect rather than its meaning. Japanese are divided into two groups: Tokyo-style and Kansai-style tone. The [iꜜma], a dialect in the Tokyo, meaning “now” stresses in the first syllable, but in the Kansai dialect [i.maꜜ] stresses the final one. The phonologic transform in two languages symbolizes respect concepts.

Secondly, in addition to the enormous gap of phonology, inflection, a change of words that can signal additional meaning (e.g. plural, tense change in English words) are part of Japanese system while Chinese doesn’t. Take verb tense in Chinese for example. If people want to create sentence structure with past tense, verbs don’t need to be transformed into another forms. Instead, just put Chinese phrases “以前” or words ”曾經” can be used to express the sentence with past-tense. Linguists call Chinese language analytic languages, which refers to write a sentence by putting words or phrases side by side. On the other hand, Japanese stands for agglutinative language, an opposite concept of analytic language. That is to say, Japanese words are not inflected certain morpheme without adding meaning. For instance, the word” iki” is a stem of the word meaning “go”. The English phrase “ want to go” is equal to the retransformed words” ikitai” after people inflect suffix “tai” into “iki”. It is quite convenient for Japanese people to use only a few words to express varied expressions while Chinese people need to write lots of word to express their meaning.

Lastly, the difference between the two languages is their sentence structure. Sentence structure of Chinese are SVO language (subject – verb – object). Compared with Chinese, the sentence structure of Japanese is grouped in SOV language (subject – object- verb). What’s more, additional mark in Japanese sentence doesn’t exist in Chinese language. The topic mark in Japanese ” wa” is a function as labeling subject. And “ wo” in Japanese marks the object in a sentence as well.

Chinese and Japanese develop different tracts respectively. Phonology in Chinese would affect the original meaning of words people want to express. Nevertheless, Japanese is upside-down. In addition to phonology, inflection working as transforming words does not exist in Chinese world and sentence structure in Chinese doesn’t correspond with Japanese forms either. In my opinion, all I mention above is tip of the iceberg between Mandarin and Japanese language. After all, as time progresses, the historic similarity has extended different meaning in spite of the same characters. By learning the tips, I believe native speakers in European and American countries will not feel upset when they distinguish these amazing languages: Chinese and Japanese.

References:

Wikipedia (2019) Agglutinative language

Retrieved from:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language

Wikipedia (2019) Japanese pitch accent

Retrieved from:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pitch_accent

Langfocus (2016) 中文與日文的相似度有多少?

Retrieved from:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHC3i6N9Wvk

Wikipedia (2019) Phonology

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