Re: Newest natlang?

On 27/09/2008, Jake B <blookerboy95@...> wrote:
> Though we borrow little from them.
You try writing a text* without using* words we got from Norman
French, then (and words we borrowed later from Latin or Greek or
coined* using* such forms*). (At least the words with asterisks aren't
purely Germanic TTBOMK.)

> I see your point, but honestly you never looked at many Asiatic languages
> before. I studied them, and at least 70-80 percent of pictiograms are
> borrowings from Mandarin Chinese.
Wait, are you talking about the written or the spoken Japanese language now?

Many kanji have two or more readings: "on", borrowed from Chinese at
various points in history (though I'm not sure whether calling the
source varieties "Mandarin" is accurate), and "kun", native Japanese
pronunciations.

If you're counting borrowings in a given text, kanji read using "kun"
readings should not be included IMO, since in that case it's just the
written form which is borrowed but not the words themselves.

For example, in "Watashi wa kuruma de ichiba e ikimasu", you might
find five kanji (watashi, kuruma, ichi - ba, i(kimasu)), yet not a
single Chinese-derived word.

But even the existence of texts with large numbers of Sino-Japanese
morphemes doesn't mean that Japanese is a dialect of Chinese any more
than English is a dialect of French, Latin, or Greek just because,
say, academic writing may have many morphemes borrowed from those
languages.

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>

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