Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese language origin?
To you linguists what language family do you think each one belongs too. I dont think any of them belong to Sino-Tibetan, and I dont see how people think Korean and Japanese can be Austronesian while Vietnam is closer to Austronesian languages, and I also think Vietnam is more cculturally related to Austronesian than Korea or Japan, because I read that Korea is considered Austronesian because they think people came from eggs, like Austronesians, well the Vietnamese did too, so what language family do you think each one comes from
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Tagged with: austronesians • eggs • japan • korea • language family • languages • linguists • vietnam • vietnamese
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I like the term "Malayo-Polynesian" better than Austronesian even though it is a broader term. Malayo-Polynesian languages stretch from Madagascar near Africa, to Hawaii and Easter Island in the Pacific. The ancesteral home of these languages was probably in India or Thailand though a few scholars have tried to place it among ancient farming communities in southern China.
Vietnamese would be part of this group. It is a known fact that Vietnamese is distantly related to Indonesian and the languages of the Philippines, while these languages in turn, are distantly related to Polynesian languages like Samoan, Maori and Hawaiian. Vietnamese may also be distantly related to Thai on the other side of the linguistic divide.
Korean and Japanese are usually classified as independent Asia languages but there is mounting evidence that the two languages are distantly related to each other and to the Ural-Altaic group of languages which includes even some European languages like Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian. The Japanese people probably do have some genetic links to the peoples of China and Southeast Asia but their language is not related to any of them.
Chinese is definitely related to Tibetan. There is some evidence that it may be distantly related to Basque and Etruscan (extinct) in Europe, and to the Northern Caucasian group of languages (Abkhazian, Chechen, Circassian, Ingush etc.) in southern Russia. There is better evidence that it is distantly related to the Athabaskan Indian languages of Western Canada and the U.S. as shown by the linguist, Edward Sapir in the 1920’s.
really? according to my parents, they all originated from Chinese. That’s why people in Korea still learn Chinese and that’s why Japan still uses some Chinese characters. For Vietnamese, it may be different though, maybe it’s written with our alphabet letters because France took over…..
Japanese is basically a very mangled and evolved Chinese language. Every Japanese character evolved from Chinese character. The sentence structure is exactly the same as Chinese. In fact, a Chinese Hokkien speaker will be able to recognise many similar sounding Japanese words.
Korean is a mongolian language with entirely different sentence structure. It has some influences from Chinese and Japanese culture because of the geographic proximity. Completely different. Each character is made up of circles and straight lines and squares. Each of these circles, lines and squares represent a syllabus.
Vietnamese is quite similar to French. It evolved actually from an archaic form of Chinese dialect, Cantonese and then when French colonized Vietnam, the two languages merged to become what it is today.
Note that all these languages evolved or gained influence from the Chinese language in one way or another. China is extremely huge and the dialects and tongues can vary greatly in the country itself. In the past, only nobles or royals can speak and write the Chinese language.
Actually most pro’s in the field of language origin along with scientist believe that spoken japanese evolved independently from asia until the modern world. chinese is definitely sino-tibetan, korean most likely is as well being along the boarder of china.
However japanese did not evolve from chinese at all as far as specialist can tell. It is true that the japanese written language did evolve from chinese written language but only because the japanese adopted the chinese language before they adopted the chinese written language the japanese had no written language, but spoken japanese did not come from chinese at all in any way.
In fact history and language experts have found that spoken japanese is actually unlike any language in the world which leads them to believe that the japanese spoken language evolved isolated from the rest of the world until the modern age.
So in conclusion the japanese did adopt the chinese written language because they needed a written language before that knowledge was passed through words alone. However the japanese spoken language is widely believe by actual experts respected in the field internationally to be a completely isolated language, meaning that it is completely unrelated to any language in the world.
Much of east China was inhabited by people related to the Vietnamese before the Chinese people expanded out of the Yellow River basin. Some of the Austric people living on the east coast of China probably sailed to Korea to escape the expanding Chinese (but most of the ancestral Vietnamese moved south of the Yangtze). The Austrics who moved to south Korea mixed with Tungusics and became the Yayoi people. These conquered Japan around the time of Christ. They mixed with Austronesians from Taiwan and the Ainu to become the Japanese people.
I just read an interesting article that says the Austric people who came to the southern part of Korea in 300 BC were probably a mixture of proto-Mons from the Yangtze and proto-Vietnamese who lived on China’s east coast. They no doubt sailed across the sea to Korea because the Han people at this time were engaged in assimilating or driving out all of the non-Han peoples north of the Yangtze. In Korea, the newcomers mixed with the Tungusic Koreans. Between 300 BC and 300 AD, all of these people immigrated to Japan (because of conflict with the pure Koreans). Once there, they mixed with Austronesians from Taiwan in Kyushu, the Austric-speaking Ezo (mixed with others like Dravidians), and the Ainu, who seem to be distant relatives of the Yukaghirs and Finns. At this time, the Ainu seem to have lost their original language and were speaking the language of the Ezo.
I have done a lot of reading since I last commented. The Koreans get very hostile if you suggest Japanese came from anything except Korean Altaic. But Japanese is Altaic spoken with a Polynesian structure; Japanese certainly didn’t get this Polynesian structure from the Koreans, despite what they say. Recent genetic studies have shown that the Koreans are related to the Samoans. Also, Korean mythology has the egg motif derived from Polynesian. How can this be? In very early times, a Micronesian/Polynesian people from the Marianas settled on the southern Japanese coast, in the Ryukyus, and on the southern Korean coast. They were originally Samoans who had migrated westward. They were driven from Guam and its neighboring islands by the Chamorros from the Phillipines. They became part of the group of peoples called the Jomon by the invading Koreans, though the Jomon proper spoke a mixture of Old Turkic and Eskimo. These were the people who gave Japanese its Polynesian structure, and also sumo wrestling. The Ainus were just Jomon who mixed with a Uralic people from the north Urals as late as 700 BC. In Japan, the Ainus lived only in Hokkaido and north Honshu. The Ryukyans are also part Ainu, so some Ainu were originally in Kyushu as well. The Vietnamese are Austroasiatic. Tai-Austronesian used to be part of Austroasiatic until they mixed with an invading wave of Nostratics from Armenia in 6000 BC. Macro-Austronesian has two main branches, Oceanic and Tai-Malay. Polynesians are Tai-Malay. The primitive tribes in central Luzon and the Melanesians are examples of Oceanic. The Korean Kofun invaders called the Jomon people Ezo, or Enzo. The macrofamily to which both Austroasiatic and Ainu belong is called Austric.
It is not true that Vietnamese language is from Chinese or any form of archaic Chinese even though there must be influences of culture, writing, and so on because of Chinese’s rule over Vietnam for a thousand years. In fact, languages of the northern region of Lao, Thai, Vietnam is the better-contained evidence of the origin of Vietnamese. With terms like Hoabinhian and Dongsonian (of the Mesolithic and Neolithic ages) address discovery of artifacts and evidences of languages and cultures that been existing in the northern areas of Vietnam, Lao, Thai that distinctively connect Vietnamese to the Southeastern language groups, not Chinese or India. According to Shafer “Ancient China”, one evidence of Confucius (551-479BC) telling his student that the people, south of China, speak differently, eat differently and live differently. In fact, Chinese, itself, is the combination of combined different cultures, languages, etc of differently group as China expand (one big group take over the smaller group, combing the two, including languages combination).