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What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)

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Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)

#181

Post by freeopinion »

rangibaby wrote: post #133
freeopinion wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your example highlights one of the amusing things about Japanese. That is the complete omission of the subject. As you said, the 「私は」 might only get thrown on as an afterthought. You can have entire conversations without ever actually voicing the subject. It can come off like a British comedy sketch for somebody to come into the middle of an exchange and try to figure out the topic from the last half of the c…

> Edit: I should say that I never noticed a native Japanese person to be confused about the unspoken topic. They seem to be able to intuit it just fine in any context. I'm mostly just laughing at my own inability there. Sometimes they will get confused and clarify with a question: 私って？ 誰のこと？ 私とは、どちら様のことでしょうか？

Just as a note, your sample Japanese seems odd to me. I'm way out of the loop on anything modern, but it is weird to see written Japanese with non-Japanese punctuation throughout.

Interestingly, it has the effect on me of giving it vocal inflection which works quite well in the context of the example.

Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)

#182

Post by cloudier »

kagevf wrote: post #180
jimmydef wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. The kanji based words sound very different from what it would sound like in Chinese This is because you are probably speaking in mandarin which has deviated a great deal from Middle Chinese ever since the Jurchen Jin conquered northern China. But if you were to compare it to a more conservative Chinese language like min-nan or some other southern chinese language, the similarities are unmistakable. examples of p…

any source on the mapping for the sound changes? That's very interesting and I would like to learn more ...

Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Japanese_vocabulary#Phone...

Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)

#183

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

danans wrote: post #109
gizmo385 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give examples of such trees? I'd be interested to look at some of these :)

They are undoubtedly referring to the highly controversial Nostratic language family hypothesis, which postulates a language superfamily that includes most of the large language families of Eurasia (i.e. Indo European, Semitic, Dravidian, Uralic) and also the proposed "Altaic" family which (also controversially) is comprised Korean, Japanese, and Turkic. Nostratic excludes the Sino-Tibetan family (i.e. Chinese langua…

Thanks for pointing out the controversy about this.

Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)

#184

Post by rangibaby »

freeopinion wrote: post #181
rangibaby wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Edit: I should say that I never noticed a native Japanese person to be confused about the unspoken topic. They seem to be able to intuit it just fine in any context. I'm mostly just laughing at my own inability there. Sometimes they will get confused and clarify with a question: 私って？ 誰のこと？ 私とは、どちら様のことでしょうか？

Just as a note, your sample Japanese seems odd to me. I'm way out of the loop on anything modern, but it is weird to see written Japanese with non-Japanese punctuation throughout. Interestingly, it has the effect on me of giving it vocal inflection which works quite well in the context of the example.

This is a great comment, it's something I have never really thought about, but now that you mention it...

、is "correct" Japanese and is used in formal or serious communications.

？ isn't technically correct in Japanese but it's become pervasive in informal to semi-serious communications in the last 15-20 years, but particularly the last 10 years.

It's comparable to the "passive aggressive full stop" in English, and the shift has happened over roughly the same time period too. These days, seeing someone write か。 instead of か？ makes me think they are either old or upset*

*in anything other than quite formal keigo mails (JMO, I am mid 30s)

> Interestingly, it has the effect on me of giving it vocal inflection which works quite well in the context of the example.

It's interesting that you write that. I would say that is why people write that way:

終わったのかもしれませんよ？

終わったのかもしれませんよ。

In [0] there is a chart that shows that Heisei-born are almost as likely to exclusively use ？ to indicate a high pitch at the end of a sentence as 40s+ are likely to exclusively use 。

[0]https://www.nhk.or.jp/bunken/research/kotoba/20170401_4.html

Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)

#185

Post by rangibaby »

thrwyoilarticle wrote: post #170
rangibaby wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tangential thought: one of the reasons that vocabulary is annoying can be presented in CS terms. Imagine reading a sentence like 'Do you want to foo the bar?'. From the context you can probably understand what kind of words foo and bar are but you don't know what they mean. Yet they're the most important words in the sentence. This isn't a coincidence: the least common words in a sentence tend to be those with the…

Not in every situation & not if you're not good enough to understand the explanation.

That's an impossible bar to clear, considering that it happens to native speakers of any language too.

Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)

#186

Post by danans »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #183
danans wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are undoubtedly referring to the highly controversial Nostratic language family hypothesis, which postulates a language superfamily that includes most of the large language families of Eurasia (i.e. Indo European, Semitic, Dravidian, Uralic) and also the proposed "Altaic" family which (also controversially) is comprised Korean, Japanese, and Turkic. Nostratic excludes the Sino-Tibetan family (i.e. Chinese langua…

Thanks for pointing out the controversy about this.

FWIW, I think it's a super interesting hypothesis, but it just doesn't have the same level of data to back it as the accepted language families do.

Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)

#187

Post by ilamont »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #144
ilamont wrote: post #24

but some time after WWII (I don't remember the exact dates) Japan and Mainland China adopted a simplified form. I lived in Taiwan when I was younger and studied Mandarin there, and can read a limited vocabulary of traditional Chinese characters. I don't know enough about the history of simplified characters in Japan, but it doesn't seem to me that they are as widely used (with a few exceptions like 国) as traditional…

That's a pretty extreme exaggeration. 臺 is on many, many famous buildings: https://tnimage.s3.hicloud.net.tw/photos/2020/CNA/20200229/2...

The example you cited is operated by a central government entity, the Taiwan Railways Administration, and is used in a few places inside and outside the station, just as every other central government building uses the traditional form. On every other map and sign it's 台北車站. The tickets printed by the TRA even use 台北 or 台北車站.
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