Re: kanji/chinese/japanese
From: Bill (ws21_at_cornell.edu)
Date: 12/22/04
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Date: Wed, 22 Dec 2004 14:45:04 -0500
In article <32t11bF3pq1lgU1@individual.net>,
Gabor Farkas <gabor@z10n.net> wrote:
> so it seems that when they invented the word for airport, they took the
> kanji for sky and the kanji for harbor.
>
> but the japanese word for sky and harbor is ( 空, そら) and (港,みなと).
>
> i understand that as usually, they used the on(chinese) reading.what i
> don't undestand is: why?.
Mostly guessing here, but I think two different things happened. In
relatively modern times, they would put two kanji together to make a new
word, as in airport. Further back, they already had a spoken word for
something, and went looking for Chinese characters to represent the
word. It turns out there are often lots of Chinese characters that make
the same sound, so they could pick two or three that at least
approximated the meaning. Sometimes, notably with verbs, they took the
Chinese character and simply changed the sound. At the beginning the
written language didn't evolve; it was literally created as a
modification of the Chinese system, probably by a small number of
literate scholars. I don't know who makes up new words; maybe newspaper
reporters.
Waiting eagerly for real experts to tell me I got it wrong.
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