Re: Japanese from Tungus

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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