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Re: Japanese from Tungus

From:Rob Haden <magwich78@...>
Date:Monday, January 24, 2005, 23:01
On Mon, 24 Jan 2005 16:37:14 -0000, caeruleancentaur
<caeruleancentaur@...> wrote:

>There is an interesting thread on the ShintoML Yahoo group >entitled "Japanese from Tungus." It may be of interest to some in >this group. The discussion is on the relationship of Japanese to >other Ural-Altaic languages and the beginning of Japanese culture. >The posts so far are numbered 4010, 4011, 4016, 4017, 4020, and 4025.
A few weeks ago, a friend and I had a discussion about Japanese. One of the topics that came up was the Japanese name for "Japan". There are two forms, Nihon and Nippon, of which the former is by far the more common. I believe this is because /p/ > /h/ (perhaps via /f/ or /P/) in (pre-)Old Japanese. Anyways, "Japanese language" in Japanese is 'Nihon go', often hyphenated or written as one word, where 'go' means "language". You may think "So, what?" but here's 'Korean language' in Korean: Han-gul. See the connection? It seems that these terms are related, as Japanese and Korean seem to be related. Except Japanese has this element *ni-. This is where my friend comes in. He has studied Japanese extensively and told me that 'ni' is the word for "morning". Aha! I made the following conclusion almost immediately. First, if Japanese and Korean are related, then the ancestors of the Japanese must have come from Korea, since it's the closest land mass to Japan. Second, the Japanese islands are east of Korea. The sun also rises in the east. Therefore, the Japanese ancestors living in Korea must've seen (or found out about) those islands and said "Hey, there's land over there where the sun comes from!" And they called it "Morning-land". On the other hand, they called the place in which they were already living (the Korean peninsula) simply "(the) Land". Anyways, I just wanted to share a revelation of mine. :) - Rob

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Matt Arriola <azathoth500@...>