Closest language to your language.

Easterner,

Yay for another person interested in Korea and Korean!! ^.^

1. On the Korean surname "Kim", it means "gold" and it's pronounced "jin" in Mandarin Chinese and "gum" in Cantonese. If your browser has the encoding, here's the character: 金 . Apparently, one of the ancient tribes to the northeast of China was called the "Jin", so that's probably where the surname was originated.

2. On the different names of Korea, there are two names for Korea as a whole: "Choson" (朝鮮) and "Han Guk" (韓國). The official name for North Korea comes from the former, and the official name for the South comes from the latter.

Given that "Choson" and "Hanguk" both refer to Korea...
a. "Choson Minchu-chui Inmin Konghwa-guk" ("Chaoxian Minzhu-zhuyi Renmin Gonghe-guo" in Mandarin Chinese) means "Korean Democratic People's Republic" word for word.
b. "Dae Han Minguk" (Da Han Minguo" in Mandarin Chinese) means "Big Korean Republic".

The hanja characters, if you can see them...
a. 朝鮮民主主義人民共和國
b. 大韓民國
The first two characters in (a) and the second character in (b) refer to "Korean".

3. Yes... I agree that Korean probably borrowed a lot of its words from Chinese. In addition, perhaps Korean borrowed the characters AND the pronunciation, whereas Japanese only borrowed the characters but NOT the pronunciation. This would explain why there's less disparity between Korean and Chinese than between Japanese and Chinese, don't you think? ^.^

Heehee,

Japanese borrowed the Chinese characters and used them with Japanese pronunciations, AND used the same characters with Chinese pronunciations. That's why most kanji have two readings: On (Chinese) and Kun (Japanese). (And often variations of one or both of them!) That, along with the two syllabaries, is what really makes Japanese difficult to learn to read and write.

A few examples:

water:

Modern Mandarin: shui
Japanese On reading: sui
Japanese Kun reading: mizu

mountain:

Modern Mandarin: shan
Japanese On reading: san
Japanese Kun reading: yama

sky:

Modern Mandarin: tian
Japanese On reading: ten
Japanese Kun reading: ame

<< sky:

Modern Mandarin: tian
Japanese On reading: ten
Japanese Kun reading: ame >>

In Japanese I thought sky is "sora" and rain is "ame",
or am I mising someting here?

Just saw this thread, David and Easterner. I'm sorry my reply is so late. There is a strong connection between the verbs in Spanish and Italian when you speak of something historical - like about God, or a war.

However, in everyday speech, it seems to me that "simple past" is used often in Spanish, while most dialects of Italian, besides those that come from very South... say Sicily, use "past perfect" (called "passato prossimo" in Italian).

En: Yesterday, I went to the store and bought an apple. While at the counter, I saw a boy I knew and I said hello. Then I left the store and started my apple, but it started to rain. I ran back to the store and stayed for another half hour.

Sp: Ayer fui a la tienda y compré una manzana. Mientre yo estaba a la tienda, vi un niño que conozco e le saludé. Entonces, salía la tienda y emprendí a comer la manzana, pero empezó a llover. Corrí alla tienda y quesdé ahí por una media hora más.

It: Ieri sono andata al negozio e ho comprato una mela. Mentre ero al negozio, ho visto un ragazzo che conosco e l'ho salutato. Poi, ho lasciato il negozio e ho cominciato a mangiare la mela, ma ha cominciato a piovere. Sono corsa al negozio e sono rimasta lì per un'altra mezz'ora.

Correct me if I'm wrong (and correct my Spanish!). I've forgotten how to speak Spanish correctly, but I think what is used for past mostly (besides imperfect) is called "pretérito perfecto" and it relates to "passato remoto" in Italian. However, in Italian, it is used mostly for historical events long past, although in the parts that I mentioned before like Sicily, it is used in everyday speech for past.

The everyday past used in Italy makes constant use of an auxillary (like essere or avere) lke the French "passé composse" (sp?). I've noticed that Spanish does have the "pretérito perfecto compuesto". Could it be used here?

Maybe everyday Spanish is like everyday Italian. People really shouldn't use the "passato prossimo" so much and should use "passato remoto", but they don't.

I just remember them drilling the "pretérito perfecto" into my head when I took Spanish. I never learned "pretérito anterior". In Italian, they drilled "passato prossimo" and only touched on passato remoto" for a week, telling us we'd hardly use it.

Mitch,

Arigatou gozaimasu ^^

it is not this elaboration

Here are a few mistakes you made......

...aprendi a comer la manzana...

The word aprendi means "learned in Spanish." If you wanted to say and I started to eat the apple you would use the word "comenzo" which would read....

...comenzo a comer la manzana...

though you could also use the word "empenzo" but you already used it in your translation and it would not sound right to use the word twice....



another example...

...Corrí alla tienda y quesdé ahí por una media hora más...


This would sound better if you wote

... Corri a la tienda y quedo alli por una media hora mas...


I hope that sounds better to you. I can fix those simple mistakes for you but for more complicated mistakes a monolinguist would probably help more I have four different languages spoken to me in any given day so my grammer may be off a little.

As to the question about the relationship between Yiddish and German: I'd have to say that Yiddish more meets the definition of a patois or creole than of an actual language. Clearly, it's not a dialect of German, because it didn't originate among people who historically spoke German. It wasn't a matter of divergence, but a matter of recombination, that gave rise to Yiddish among German Jews.

It was suggested that French is the closest language to English, lexically speaking. This may be an accurate statement, as the Norman French had a remarkable influence on English vocabulary, but it should not lead those who are not native English-speakers to believe that the influence of French has been so great as to minimize the considerable impact of Latin, Greek and a host of other world languages. The English language, like America, is truly a melting pot.

As an aside, I think it's interesting to note that French loan-words often did not supplant the basic Germanic terms for things that were native to English, but were often added alongside. French terms for things were quite the rage at one point in English, being seen as more "cultured" than the frank, honest Germanic terminology. Classic examples are the terms used for animals versus the terms used for those same creatures as food:

(Germanic origin) Swine, cow (Ger. Schwein, Kuh)
(French/Romance Language origin) Pork, Beef (Fr. porc, boef)

Hi, I'd like to comment on the relationship between Korean, Japanese, and Chinese. The reason why so many words sound similar between these three languages is simply that Korean and Japanese borrowed a lot of words--more than half (maybe 60-70% in each of the two) from Classical Chinese, since China has been a dominant power in East Asia and therefore the route by which sophisticated vocabulary entered Korea and Japan. Korean and Japanese are similar to each other in terms of sentence structure and the way words get manipulated. In this sense they are also remarkably similar to Mongolian, Turkish, and Manchu.

Some linguists believe that Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Manchu, and Turkish are all related to each other, but this is very hard to prove. And linguists agree that both Korean and Japanese are completely or almost completely unrelated to Chinese. Meanwhile, the Japanese and Korean languages have given almost nothing back to the Chinese language.

Those of you who have seen Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon may remember the scene in which Lo is singing outside the cave while Jen takes a bath. He is singing in Uygur, which is a Turkic language, and some Turkish people claim to be able to understand the words.

I believe the reason why Sino-Korean number words sound more similar to Cantonese is that modern Cantonese pronunciation changed less over time than Mandarin, and Koreans borrowed the number words from the Chinese a long time ago...therefore it makes sense that a dialect of Chinese that has changed less over time will have preserved pronunciations that are more similar to words borrowed into Korean.

If you wanted to write Kim using a Chinese character you would use the character for "gold." Actually the Korean word for gold sounds different, sort of like "Koom." But the Japanese word for gold is "Kin" (sounds a little bit like "king"), so although I don't know Chinese I would guess the Chinese word sounds something like "kim," "kin," or something in between. And I'd guess it would sound more like kim/kin in Cantonese than in Mandarin.

Tony Shin,

Re: "Some linguists believe that Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Manchu, and Turkish are all related to each other..."

It would seem so and they also have distant links to Hungarian, Finnish, Tungus Eskimo and even Indo-European.

"but this is very hard to prove."

Modern advances in linguistics over the last twenty five (25) years are making it it less difficult to prove. In 1966, Russian linguists found evidence of a distant relationship between Chinese and Basque, an ancient language that was once spoken in much of western Europe and the British Isles. As far back as the 1920's Edward Sapir demonstrated the relationship between Chinese and the Athabaskan group of American Indian languages. Some linguists today would extend that to include the Uto-Aztecan and Pacific Northwest Amrican Indian languages too.

bubba

Norman and french are 2 different laznguages. Why the hell so many people are making a confusion between these 2 languages?!!

Guest (plus haut) : tout à fait d'accord. L'ancien français et l'ancien normand (ou plutôt les anciens normands car l'ancien normand méridional relève plutôt de l'Oïl occidental et l'ancien normand septentrional de l'Oïl septentrional) sont deux langues différentes appartenant à la grande famille d'Oïl qui englobe aussi le picard, le wallon, le berrichon, le gallo, le champenbois etc. Et la langue d'Oïl parlée pendant plusieurs siècles dans les Îles britanniques, bien que n'étant ni de l'ancien français ni de l'ancien normand au sens strict, s'apparente à l'ancien français en ceci qu'elle est également une forme supradialectale. Si « français » sert, par extension, à désigner ce double phénomène de concrétion supradialectale et d'expansion géographique, alors on peut désigner la langue des rois de France par l'expression « ancien français capétien » et celle des Plantagenêt par « ancien français d'outre-Manche ».

bubba : « (...) l'impact considerable du latin et du grec (...) ».
C'est exact. Mais ce sont les locuteurs de l'ancien français d'outre-Manche qui ont introduit le recours au grec et au latin de manière massive. Le vieil-anglais a certes importé des emprunts gréco-latins à plusieurs reprises, mais ce n'est (presque) rien à côté du volume après la conquête du duc de Normandie.

bubba : « Je pense que c'est intéressant de noter que souvent les emprunts français n'ont pas supplanté le fonds germanique pour les choses inhérentes à l'anglais car ils furent souvent surajoutés. »
C'est vrai dans certains cas. Mais il faut noter également que 85 % du fonds lexical vieil-anglais a tout simplement disparu de la langue anglaise. Il y a donc une forte présomption en faveur du remplacement des formes vieil-anglaises par les langues du domaine d’Oïl : ancien français d’outre-Manche, ancien français capétien, ancien normano-picard etc.

bubba : « (...) le français normand a considérablement influencé le vocabulaire anglais (...) ».
Attention ! Le français normand c'est la façon de parler le français en Normandie (éventuellement teintée de normandismes). C'est l'ancien français d'outre-Manche et l’ancien français capétien qui ont considérablement marqué le lexique anglais, pas le français normand qui est du français (et non du normand) comme on le parle à Rouen ou à Caen.

Romanian: Latin, Catalan, Italian, Spanish, ............, French

>>As to the question about the relationship between Yiddish and German: I'd have to say that Yiddish more meets the definition of a patois or creole than of an actual language. Clearly, it's not a dialect of German, because it didn't originate among people who historically spoke German. It wasn't a matter of divergence, but a matter of recombination, that gave rise to Yiddish among German Jews.<<

Umm, sorry, but no. It is most clearly a descendant of Middle High German, and pretty much everything about it looks like a High German dialect/language once one looks past the Slavic, Hebrew, and Romance loanwords in it. I say dialect/language, as with High German, it's really hard to actually call it as a whole a single unified language on purely linguistic terms, but at the same time it is often hard to decide where the line between a "dialect" and a "language" is, due to High German, for the most part, being a continuous dialect continuum.

And yes, even its seemingly weird elements, such as its use of "a" as opposed to standard Hochdeutsch "ein" and its lack of a preterite are not really that weird at all once you look at the High German dialects/languages as a whole, as, for example, Austro-Bavarian also has "a" for the indefinite article, and much of spoken German does not use the preterite outside of auxiliary and modal verbs. Furthermore, its morphology looks very much like that of a relatively conservative High German dialect/language, even if its genitive may have merged with the dative in most places; however, one must remember that many High German dialects/languages have already long lost the genitive since the beginning of the Early New High German period.

All things considered, the very last thing it looks like is a creole, as its morphology is typically inflecting High German-type morphology, which would have almost certainly been heavily levelled had it undergone creolization. If anything, I would say the opposite, and say that Yiddish is no *less* German, than, say Swiss German, and say that if one considers, say, Swiss German to be a set of dialects of German (even though I myself find it hard to call Upper Alemannic dialects the same language as standard Hochdeutsch), then one should also consider Yiddish to be a set of dialects of German.

>>It was suggested that French is the closest language to English, lexically speaking. This may be an accurate statement, as the Norman French had a remarkable influence on English vocabulary, but it should not lead those who are not native English-speakers to believe that the influence of French has been so great as to minimize the considerable impact of Latin, Greek and a host of other world languages. The English language, like America, is truly a melting pot.<<

Very funny. The core grammar of English is most undoubtedly West Germanic, specifically Anglo-Frisian West Germanic, even if a lot of Old Norman, French, and Latin vocabulary did end up getting glued onto it, and that is ignoring the influence of Old Norse at that (as while Old Norse did not contribute as many words to English as Old Norman and French have, its influence was actually much *deeper* than theirs was).

>>As an aside, I think it's interesting to note that French loan-words often did not supplant the basic Germanic terms for things that were native to English, but were often added alongside. French terms for things were quite the rage at one point in English, being seen as more "cultured" than the frank, honest Germanic terminology. Classic examples are the terms used for animals versus the terms used for those same creatures as food:<<

Well, that's just because the native Germanic terms got relegated to use at home and like in many cases, with more literary forms being taken from Old Norman and then later French, due to the social class of the Anglo-Norman ruling class when compared with the general English population, consequently resulting in lexical variation with respect to register.