# Japanese and Chinese Morphology



## bloop123

Hi everyone

I realise there are a few threads on the relationship between Chinese and Japanese. From I have read the syntax/ structure of these languages are very different but have a lot of borrowings in vocabulary and have a related writing system.

I don't feel as though these threads touched on the relationship between vocabulary and morphology. Surely if these languages have significant shared vocabulary wouldn't this affect the morphology of these languages and therefore affect the grammar?

Sorry for using a European model but I have no knowledge of Chinese, Japanese (or any non European languages for that matter) further than a glance at a few wikipedia articles.

For example although the Latin/Romance and English grammars are quite different from eachother, due to shared vocabulary we 'form' words quite similarily 
Eg the 're' prefix on verbs meaning the action is done again
'Co' prefix meaning 'with'
The way we form adgectives/past participles
Eg English Stressed French Stressé Italian Stressato are all adgectives and are clearly cognates from the basic 'stress' + past participle

To the mods Im not really sure to put this thread so be free to move it. Thankyou


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## CapnPrep

If you're talking about prefixation and suffixation, Chinese and Japanese are very different and I don't think the two languages have moved significantly closer to one another in this respect. Chinese has very few prefixes and suffixes in general, and I can't think of any that might be borrowings from Japanese.

Both languages make extensive use of compounding, however, and I suspect that this morphological process was native to Chinese and borrowed into Japanese. (I don't actually know enough about the history of these languages to be sure.)


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## bloop123

CapnPrep said:


> If you're talking about prefixation and suffixation, Chinese and Japanese are very different and I don't think the two languages have moved significantly closer to one another in this respect. Chinese has very few prefixes and suffixes in general, and I can't think of any that might be borrowings from Japanese.
> 
> Both languages make extensive use of compounding, however, and I suspect that this morphological process was native to Chinese and borrowed into Japanese. (I don't actually know enough about the history of these languages to be sure.)



Two questions to this
Can you think of any  'words'/morphemes which are more likely to be compounded to another to form new words which don't have much meaning on there own which are shared between the two languages? 

Are there many compound words that have been borrowed as a 'whole' which are then annylsed differently into the new language then in the original where the locals know these two words?

Eg say there were many compounds with the word 'house'
Farm house
Fun house
The people in the original language when first hearing the word house they would think of a building where someone lives or a structure however in the new language the 'home' meaning is not contained and they consider the ' 'house' part to be something to attach to a word meaning 'structure' 
They could then apply this to new situations in their own language 
Xxxx house thus creating a new morphine. (Xxxx being a native term)

Sorry if this isn't making much sense. Im just trying to apply my experience with European languages to see how languages influence one another 

Thanks for your help


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## jmx

Both Chinese and Japanese have numerical classifiers. I think that this feature was borrowed from Chinese to Japanese, but I'm not completely sure.


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## CapnPrep

jmx said:


> Both Chinese and Japanese have numerical classifiers.


OK but this is syntactic (and lexical), not morphological, wouldn't you say?


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## caelum

bloop123 said:


> For example although the Latin/Romance and English grammars are quite different from eachother, due to shared vocabulary we 'form' words quite similarily
> Eg the 're' prefix on verbs meaning the action is done again
> 'Co' prefix meaning 'with'
> The way we form adgectives/past participles
> Eg English Stressed French Stressé Italian Stressato are all adgectives and are clearly cognates from the basic 'stress' + past participle
> 
> To the mods Im not really sure to put this thread so be free to move it. Thankyou



The thing about your point here is that those prefixes came from Latin and Greek to English mostly through Norman French in the XI century (and the centuries that followed) along with all most of the other French/Latin words that we acquired.

Stress is an English word that was borrowed into Romance languages, probably through French, but I'm uncertain.

I would imagine that any similarities between Chinese (Mandarin?) and Japanese comes from the fact that Japan was once under Chinese power, along with Korea, Vietnam, etc.


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## Johnnyjohn

To give a rundown. Chinese is very analytic and isolating while Japanese is agglutinating. Chinese is starting to show some agglutinating features such as the -men plural for beings. They are not in the same family, like English is to Hungarian. Mandarin is not such as good example as it has suffered from heavy non-native acquisition during its history (Mongols, Manchus, and other dialect speakers to this day) akin to English, so it may lack many grammatical features found in other dialects showing a stronger defining of what a Sino language holds. Many words in Japanese from Sinitic origins may have seeped into the grammar, such as measure words, and the reflexive in both languages is familiar. 
(Ziji and jibun wherein the last syllable of jibun is related to "fen" which is of Sino origin.)


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## fdb

caelum said:


> I would imagine that any similarities between Chinese (Mandarin?) and Japanese comes from the fact that Japan was once under Chinese power.



You imagine wrongly. Japan was never ruled by China. The Chinese loanwords came to Japan through book learning and in particular through Buddhist texts.


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## caelum

Was that the only reason that Chinese characters were used in East Asia for so long? I wasn't sure.


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## jmx

CapnPrep said:


> OK but this is syntactic (and lexical), not morphological, wouldn't you say?


I don't know. If things like articles or demonstratives are studied in Morphology, it seems to me that numerical classifiers can be morphological too.

By the way, I suppose that 'numerical classifiers' or 'counter words' is the same thing that Johnnyjohn calls 'measure words', Am I right?


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## Angelo di fuoco

Yes, you are.


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## bloop123

caelum said:


> The thing about your point here is that those prefixes came from Latin and Greek to English mostly through Norman French in the XI century (and the centuries that followed) along with all most of the other French/Latin words that we acquired.
> 
> Yes and now we can apply these prefixes with new words so in a way they have become 'grammaticalised' due to the influx of vocabulary which was what I was trying to apply to Chinese/Japanese
> 
> Stress is an English word that was borrowed into Romance languages, probably through French, but I'm uncertain.


Isn't it amazing that they didn't use 'stressed'  as the adgective though? We can translate the 'parts' of the word so easily
Stress + past participle
Ie in English we use ed
        French uses é
        Italian uses ato
Which is how we form the past tense of the most common regular verbs of these languages.
These languages don't use other endings for example Italian could have simply made it stresso/a/i/e
This shows that our shared vocabulary shows shared ways to form words


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## bloop123

I stuffed up some of the quoting but I hope you guys can see the conversation in the above post


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## Johnnyjohn

bloop123 said:


> Isn't it amazing that they didn't use 'stressed'  as the adgective though? We can translate the 'parts' of the word so easily
> Stress + past participle
> Ie in English we use ed
> French uses é
> Italian uses ato
> Which is how we form the past tense of the most common regular verbs of these languages.
> These languages don't use other endings for example Italian could have simply made it stresso/a/i/e
> This shows that our shared vocabulary shows shared ways to form words



English has lost functional many diminutives/prefixing/ and suffixing to form new words on the fly colloquially.


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## bloop123

Johnnyjohn said:


> English has lost functional many diminutives/prefixing/ and suffixing to form new words on the fly colloquially.



In a way so has French, if you compare it to the amount of suffixes Italian has
Eg etto/etta accio/a, uccio/a, ono/a etc to express different nuances of a word.

but that doesn't mean we don't share a lot of our morphology another example being we share the prefix dis with French

Standard English is pretty restrictive in terms of forming new words. I know many native speakers have trouble whether to use un, ex, im, anti, dis etc before a particular word to make it negative and there are many prescriptivists who label people as 'uneducated' for using un too much. 

However in my experience I find Australian colloquial English extremely productive. You can easily turn any noun into a verb and have it understood simply from the syntax or by adding ize/ate to the end of it. You can make a word negative by using the prefix un, and by shortening the word and adding o or ie/y, depending on the conext it acts as either a diminutive or pejorative. There are many more which Im not in the mood to list. Half the time when I am speaking with my friends I feel as though I am making words up on the spot, although this is probably typical of young people of most languages


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## Angelo di fuoco

French used to have many more suffixes, before Malherbe & the Académie Française came up with their "puristic" attitude. Vivent Ronsard & Villon!

To come back to the topic: I know something about Chines but don't know much about Japanese, only that the structures of the languages are very different. However, this does not exclude taking over some grammatical features, like English adopting the "more" comparative & "most" superlative for adjectives with more than two syllables, especially of Latin or Romance provenience.


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## bearded

Hello Johnnyjohn
In your post #7 you say that Jap. bun corresponds to Chin. fen.  Not knowing those two languages, so far I had believed that 'bun' corresponded to Chin. bao as in 'tatzebao', and Jap.jibun/shinbun (as the paper Mainichi Shinbun) to Chin. tzebao.  Was I wrong all along ?


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## CapnPrep

bearded man said:


> Not knowing those two languages, so far I had believed that 'bun' corresponded to Chin. bao as in 'tatzebao', and Jap.jibun/shinbun (as the paper Mainichi Shinbun) to Chin. tzebao.  Was I wrong all along ?


They are all different characters:  

dazibao = 大字*報* 
shinbun = 新*聞* 
jibun = 自*分*


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## bearded

Thank you, CapnPrep.


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