# The Influence of Arabic on Japanese



## nn.om

Hmm, I don't think I'm saying something important here but I just wanted to share you what amazed me when I was learning Japanese 10 years ago.


I noticed that some words in Japanese are very similar to some other words in Arabic. This actually made me think of an influence Arabic had on Japanese. That influence may be ignored because I haven't seen anyone talking about a kind of connection these languages might have in the past? 
I don't know, but let me tell you the vocabs I'm talking about =] 


They say 'anata' which means 'you.' It's used only when talking to a group of females. That means it is  أنتن (antun) in Arabic, but y'know, أنتَ الذي قرأ مذكراتي.   

'Sake' is kind of alcohol.  The cup-bearer in English is ساقي (saki), isn't it? 


'Sama' is used when calling someone in high position like a prince or princess. Accordingly, when I marry a prince, you will have to call me, "Mona-Sama." Or in Arabic, سمو الأميرة منى: You know the root of سمو is سما (sama). 

'Deki' means 'smart.' Don't you think it's so similar to ذكي (thaki) in Arabic?



I was learning Japanese on my own and surprisingly some of the first words I learned were these. I'm sure there are some other Japanese words that interested me but unfortunately I think mum got rid of my 11-year-old notebooks the first time I flew to Uni.


----------



## Kinan

Interesting, not very close to the Arabic words but they actually might have some connection.
I ,however , can't think of how could Arabic influence Japanese as they had no real contact between them.


----------



## Ghabi

Jokes aside, pick two languages (provided that they have similar phonetic structures, e.g. polysyllabic) and you are almost bound to "discover" this kind of look-alikes ("false cognates", some might say). 

It's just a matter of probability (do the math if you feel like). The Mbabaram language (an aboriginal Australian language) is well known (if it's known at all) for having the word _dog_, which means, well what else, "dog".

I bet that many here have wondered about the connection between "earth" and ارض. But the truth might be (as truth often is) a bit anti-climax: just a coincidence.


----------



## Anatoli

Japanese is hardly related to any language, the most influence is from Chinese, later some Portuguese and Spanish, later English and some German and French. Of course, there are borrowings from many languages, including Arabic, which are rendered phonetically but adjusted to the Japanese phonetic system. So الله becomes Arraafu or Arraa (アッラーフ or アッラー) and إسلام becomes Isuramu (イスラム).

أنت and あなた (anata) and others are indeed very similar. It never occurred to me. 

*[Off topic part about 'bad' snipped. It's Persian bad and it's been discussed at least 20 times in EHL *
*Frank, moderator]*


----------



## Faylasoof

Kinan said:


> Well, i have read in a very sacred and rare book that the Japanese language has been invented before the invention of internet.
> I don't know if it's true or not but this is what i have read.



Yes! But the angels were invented much earlier! 



Ghabi said:


> Jokes aside, pick two languages (provided that they have similar phonetic structures, e.g. polysyllabic) and you are almost bound to "discover" this kind of look-alikes ("false cognates", some might say).



I agree! Jocularity aside, this has been much discussed and there are many examples of false cognates.



> I bet that many here have wondered about the connection between "earth" and ارض. But the truth might be (as truth often is) a bit anti-climax: just a coincidence.


 
  We have a thread on this! Just search. Derived from Old English, here.


----------



## Faylasoof

Abu Rashid said:


> ...With Middle Eastern & European languages, there's probably more likely a link, than with something like Japanese, which just had no direct contact with the West in old times. The Middle East, North Africa and Southern Europe were pretty much always linked together around the Mediterranean.



Seems like a reasonable assumption. However, there is a _possible_ route by which there _might_ have been some contact between Arabic and Sino-Japanese languages and that is via the small but old Chinese (Han) Muslim community – the descendents of  Arab and / or Muslim traders who might have known Arabic (not sure about this). 

There is as yet no evidence I’ve found for this community maintaining the Arabic language for any given time to even have a chance for any influence on home ground, let alone Japan. Our Chinese colleagues here can perhaps shed more light on this.

BTW, Ibn Batuta did spend some time in south east China, married locally and had children. His present-day descendents can still be found and according to Tim Mackintosh-Smith (author of _Travels with a Tangerine_ and translator of _Travels of Ibn Battutah_), they and the Chinese Muslim community have recenty rediscovered the joys of learning Arabic!


----------



## Frank06

*Hi,*

*We moved the thread to EHL. Though the jokes were funny, I deleted them. Sorry for that.*

*The topic is influence of Arabic on Japanese. Please stick to that topic.*

*Otherwise said, this thread is not about Arabic loans in IE languages, nor in Chinese (and yes, we are aware of the tremendous influence of Chinese on Japanese).*
*I think that these topics are interesting and that they deserve their own threads.*

*I moved a few posts on Chinese and Arabic to this new thread.*
*We already have a thread on earth.*


*Frank*
*Moderator EHL*


----------



## Frank06

Hi,


Ghabi said:


> Jokes aside, pick two languages (provided that they have similar phonetic structures, e.g. polysyllabic) and you are almost bound to "discover" this kind of look-alikes ("false cognates", some might say).
> It's just a matter of probability (do the math if you feel like).


It's been mentioned a few times already in connection with this kind of questions, but it's not bad to look at these two (almost classic by now) texts:
1. Donal Ringe: On calculating the factor of chance in language comparison‎
2. Mark Rosenfelder: How likely are chance resemblances between languages? - Quite likely, really. A statistical investigation. 

Groetjes,

Frank


----------



## phosphore

Japanese must be in fact a descendant of Arabic since Arabic is the oldest human language ever. Hence great many similar words (4 already).

Hello, is this a linguistics forum or what?


----------



## Frank06

phosphore said:


> Japanese must be in fact a descendant of Arabic since Arabic is the oldest human language ever. Hence great many similar words (4 already).
> Hello, is this a linguistics forum or what?


Yes, it is. This is a linguistics forum for everybody who's got a question about historical, comparative and general linguistics.
Is that a problem?

In one week, we had the occasion to discuss two common questions: 
1. "X is the oldest language" and 
2. "Is language X related to language Y" (or "Did language X influence language Y") on the basis of a few random words which look similar."

These questions pop up regularly in almost every single message board which discusses language. Which means that this kind of topics need to be addressed once in a while, and that they need to be repeated, once in a while.
These questions give us the opportunity to write about common, often naive, misconceptions people have about historical linguistics, misconceptions which are incredible persistent. 
The replies to these questions can give food for thought about concepts quite a lot of people take for granted.

And as a surplus, we had us an interesting new thread about Chinese and Arabic cultural and language(?) contact.

Not bad, is it?

Groetjes,

Frank


----------



## phosphore

It is just symptomatic that both of these threads, as well as numerous claims in some other topics, are about Arabic having a privileged place in the world languages constelation and influencing like indigenous languages of the Pacific. To talk about some Arabic and Japanese basic vocabulary "cognates" _is not bad_, though it seems pretty much non-sense to me, but not pointing out that these "cognates" do not need to be there through the Arabic influence on Japanese but maybe it was the other way round - that _is bad_, actually.


----------



## Kevin Beach

I am ignorant about the Arabic and Japanese languages, but there is a piece of inescapable logic that can be applied to the situation.

If language A and language B have words in common, then it is as valid to theorise that B influenced A as that A influenced B; or indeed, that neither influenced the other but that the similarities are serendipitous.

Therefore, unless there is evidence of either Arabic or Japanese influencing the other, all three of the following theories are valid:

1. That Japanese influenced Arabic;

2. That Arabic influenced Japanese;

3. That the similarities are the purest coincidence and have nothing to do with influence either way.


----------



## Flaminius

nn.om said:


> They say 'anata' which means 'you.' It's used only when talking to a group of females. That means it is  أنتن (antun) in Arabic, but y'know, أنتَ الذي قرأ مذكراتي.


The word _anata_ is a second person singular demonstrative that applies both to men and women.  If you want to compare Japanese demonstratives with Arabic ones, you should take into consideration other forms in both languages.

Arabic (second persons male female; singular and plural forms):
_anta_, _anti_
_antum_, _antunna_

It is obvious that the base _ant-_ gets suffixes to express different numbers and genders.

Now, a few words about Japanese demonstratives.
Japanese have many personal demonstratives that were clearly general nouns.  One of them is _anata_.  First, it was "far away" and "far back."  Otherwise said, it started out as a reference to a time or a place far away from the speaker.  The "far" sense later developed into a honorific reference to third persons.  The earliest use of anata as the second person demonstrative is from the mid 18th century.

Before _anata_ supplanted, the second person was _sonata_.  The first person was _konata_.  As you can see, the demontratives were formed by attaching a prefix to _-nata_, which is "side" or "place."

The prefixes don't have handy one-word translations in English.    Japanese demonstratives system hinges on the concept that all objects and ideas relevant to the conversation are either 1. more relevant or closer to the speaker, 2 more relevant or closer to the listener, or 3 more relevant or closer to neither.  At a first glance it looks similar to categorisation by I, you and them but it is not necessarily so.

Things that are closer to the speaker are marked by the prefix _ko-_.  _Kore_ is "this" as a noun, referring to an object in front of the speaker.  If the object is spatially closer to the listener, it is referred to as _sore_ by the speaker.  Now I think the pattern is clear.  A thing closer to _konata_ (I) or in the speaker's vicinity (_koko_) is _kore_ and what's closer to _sonata_ (you) is _sore_.  The third prefix _a-_ makes _are_ (that thing over there), _ano_ (of that thing over there), _achira_ (there) and so on; all referring to ideas and objects not immediately related to the speaker or the listener.  In fact there is a forth prefix _do-_ to form interrogative words such as _dore_ (what), _dono_ (which) and _doko_ (where).  Items with these prefixes are commonly called _kosoado_ words.  [Esperanto has a similar and more organised system for deriving demonstratives.]

Coming back to the comparison with the Arabic second person masculine singular, we can see that _anata_ is part of a very different morphological system.  If _anata_ and _anta_ were related, I'd expect a word like *_konta_ for the Arabic first person singular.



> 'Sake' is kind of alcohol.  The cup-bearer in English is ساقي (saki), isn't it?


The general Japanese word for alcoholic drinks is _sake_.  The specific reference to "rice wine" is a derived sense.  Anyway, the Arabic word _sāqī_ can be compared with more similar words such as _saki_ "cape" and _saki_ "tearing up" (no pronunciation difference; Japanese has a awful lot of homonyms).  




> 'Sama' is used when calling someone in high position like a prince or princess. Accordingly, when I marry a prince, you will have to call me, "Mona-Sama." Or in Arabic, سمو الأميرة منى: You know the root of سمو is سما (sama).


The use of _-sama_ as a suffix bears similarity with the Arabic word.  The original, much older use of the word is an independent noun meaning "appearance."




> 'Deki' means 'smart.' Don't you think it's so similar to ذكي (thaki) in Arabic?


The smart sense is a very modern derive meaning.  Literally "come (_ki_) out (_de_)", the verb _dekiru_ is originally "emerge," "created," "born", "happen."


 Japanese has a very short recorded history compared to many major languages and language families discussed in this EHL forum.  Still, I believe we know enough about it to demonstrate that these for cases are chance coincidences.

I know the burden of proof is squarely on those who claim connections between Japanese and Arabic.  I took it nonetheless because I have heard _anata_-_anta _connection so many times that I decided it is worth a while to mention that a good joke is not always a serious linguistic argument.


----------



## sokol

Anatoli said:


> Japanese is hardly related to any language, the most influence is from Chinese ...


The standard theory as far as Japanese is concerned is that it is a language isolate, not closer related to another language or language group, but there's also the Altaic theory (stating that Japanese were in fact, historically, an Austronesian language "re-invented" through Altaic influence into a new linguistic system which doesn't fit in into any language family); we've had that topic before e. g. in the continental Japanese thread, also I've dug up some article about this about a year ago (posted in the Japanese-Turkish thread).

Chinese influence only came much later, as well as influence from many other languages. I think it is safe to assume that mutual influence between Arabic and Japanese has been minimal and may be limited almost exclusively to loans since the 20th century; some minimal influence might have happened before but I cannot imagine how there could have been any _significant _influence - in either direction.


----------



## Faylasoof

Flaminius said:


> … Japanese has a very short recorded history compared to many major languages and language families discussed in this EHL forum. Still, I believe we know enough about it to demonstrate that these for cases are chance coincidences.
> ….because I have heard _anata_-_anta _connection so many times that I decided it is worth a while to mention that a good joke is not always a serious linguistic argument.


Precisely my sentiments Flaminius! Thanks for this detailed comparison! 


phosphore said:


> It is just symptomatic that both of these threads, as well as numerous claims in some other topics, are about Arabic having a privileged place in the world languages constelation and influencing like indigenous languages of the Pacific.


 Whether one likes it or not, and as languages go, Arabic is a very important language. For us in the East it occupies more or less the same position as Latin in the West in the way it has influenced many languages, particularly via its vocabulary.  Of course this has a lot to do with the spread of Islam to various parts of Asia; Central, South and South East. So Arabic _has_ ended up influencing the indigenous languages of the Pacific, e.g. Indonesian, though no evidence for any influence on Japanese in ancient times. 


phosphore said:


> To talk about some Arabic and Japanese basic vocabulary "cognates" _is not bad_, though it seems pretty much non-sense to me, but not pointing out that these "cognates" do not need to be there through the Arabic influence on Japanese but maybe it was the other way round - that _is bad_, actually.


 Given that Japan was an isolated country for centuries - a point I make in the other thread too- and most likely had no contact with pre-Islamic, or more precisely peri-Islamic Arabs, by which time the Arabic language was already well formed, I would imagine that any possible Japanese influence on Classical Arabic would have to be restricted to and imagined via some long-distance, ethereal or  telepathic communication! There is as yet no solid evidence that such phenomena actually work, though it may be delightful to dream about them.  


sokol said:


> … I think it is safe to assume that mutual influence between Arabic and Japanese has been minimal and may be limited almost exclusively to loans since the 20th century; some minimal influence might have happened before but I cannot imagine how there could have been any _significant _influence - in either direction.


 I too feel that any supposed influence is restricted to loan words and is of recent origin.


Kevin Beach said:


> I am ignorant about the Arabic and Japanese languages, but there is a piece of inescapable logic that can be applied to the situation.


 KB, Aristotelian logic is a great tool but quite obviously it is as good a tool as the parameters it is dealing with. 





> If language A and language B have words in common, then it is as valid to theorise that B influenced A as that A influenced B; or indeed, that neither influenced the other but that the similarities are serendipitous…


 The points you make have more or less been answered given the views put forward by Anatoli, Flaminius, Sokol and even yours truly. 

Just to emphasize, there seems to be is no evidence that the Japanese ever traded with Ancient Arabia or the other way round. Trade (or conquest) was the way earlier cultures and linguistic groups came into contact with each other, an essential prerequisite for significant mutual influence. To my knowledge, there is not even any mention of a land called Japan in Classical Arabic -the converse may also be true, but I know no Japanese- even though both India and China get a mention. In fact, with India there was quite a trade in pre-Islamic times as proven by the presence of verbs and adjectives associated with it.


----------



## phosphore

Faylasoof said:


> Given that Japan was an isolated country for centuries - a point I make in the other thread too- and most likely had no contact with pre-Islamic, or more precisely peri-Islamic Arabs, by which time the Arabic language was already well formed, I would imagine that any possible Japanese influence on Classical Arabic would have to be restricted to and imagined via some long-distance, ethereal or telepathic communication! There is as yet no solid evidence that such phenomena actually work, though it may be delightful to dream about them.


 
Quite funny I must say. Do you dream about such "ethereal or telepathic" influence of Arabic on Japanese?

I feel like I should point out that if X was in contact with Y, and not through "ethereal or telepathic" communication forms, then Y would have been in contact with X, too.


----------



## sokol

(Mod-dish note )



phosphore said:


> Quite funny I must say.


Oh but I am quite sure that it was meant to be funny. 

However, guys, and I'm addressing this line to all of you, please keep jokes out of this discussion no matter how funny they might be. 



phosphore said:


> I feel like I should point out that if X was in contact with Y, and not through "ethereal or telepathic" communication forms, then Y would have been in contact with X, too.



Quite so.

But please let's not focus on ethereal or telepathic communication here - unless someone can offer hard facts which prove that they exist.


----------



## Outsider

Faylasoof said:


> Whether one likes it or not, and as languages go, Arabic is a very important language. For us in the East it occupies more or less the same position as Latin in the West in the way it has influenced many languages, particularly via its vocabulary.  Of course this has a lot to do with the spread of Islam to various parts of Asia; Central, South and South East. So Arabic _has_ ended up influencing the indigenous languages of the Pacific, e.g. Indonesian, though no evidence for any influence on Japanese in ancient times.


Yes. I think it would have been possible for Arabic to influence Japanese in a roundabout way, via other East Asian languages. Although the Arabic language never spread beyond India, as far as I know, Islam did go as far as Indonesia, so no doubt some East Asian languages have a couple of borrowings from Arabic.

So, some distant influence of Arabic on Japanese is not altogether implausible. But it would have to be established first. As far as the correspondences put forward by Nn.om are concerned, Flaminius has shown convincingly that they are coincidental.

And I'd like to add that even between languages that are known to have influenced each other there can be chance correspondences. A well-known example are the Japanese and Portuguese words for "thank you", _arigatô_ and _obrigado_.


----------



## XiaoRoel

Si alguna relación hay entre el árabe y el chino (o el coreano, o el japonés) es más o menos reciente y por intermedio de otras lenguas (español, portugués, inglés, malayo). No se pueden buscar cinco pies a un gato.


----------



## Polyglotta

nn.om said:


> Hmm, I don't think I'm saying something important here but I just wanted to share you what amazed me when I was learning Japanese 10 years ago.
> 
> 
> I noticed that some words in Japanese are very similar to some other words in Arabic. This actually made me think of an influence Arabic had on Japanese. That influence may be ignored because I haven't seen anyone talking about a kind of connection these languages might have in the past?
> I don't know, but let me tell you the vocabs I'm talking about =]
> 
> 
> They say 'anata' which means 'you.' It's used only when talking to a group of females. That means it is أنتن (antun) in Arabic, but y'know, أنتَ الذي قرأ مذكراتي.
> 
> 'Sake' is kind of alcohol. The cup-bearer in English is ساقي (saki), isn't it?
> 
> 
> 'Sama' is used when calling someone in high position like a prince or princess. Accordingly, when I marry a prince, you will have to call me, "Mona-Sama." Or in Arabic, سمو الأميرة منى: You know the root of سمو is سما (sama).
> 
> 'Deki' means 'smart.' Don't you think it's so similar to ذكي (thaki) in Arabic?
> 
> 
> 
> I was learning Japanese on my own and surprisingly some of the first words I learned were these. I'm sure there are some other Japanese words that interested me but unfortunately I think mum got rid of my 11-year-old notebooks the first time I flew to Uni.


 
I am afraid you'll perhaps be frustrated by my reply but please don't take it personal.
The directional noun(!)　_anata_ （あなた・貴方）is a compound form meaning originally "that person" , an old form is sonata(そなた）.　And it's definitely not used only to girls.
The root of _sake_　さけ（酒）　is　_saka_-さか

_sama_（さま・様）is　not used only to nobility, but everybody is adressed with this word in the address on envelopes.
Is _Mona-_ Japanese?　The sound mona　is　very　un-Japanese.　
 Where did you find the explanation for _dek_i as "smart"? Did you mean _deki no ii_(出来の良い）"having　good・fine results?　In　this combination _deki _means "outcome".

There exists extremely　few　material indicating any influence in historical times from Arabic onto Japanese.　There is almost no region in Eurasia which might not have had some historic relation with Japan. Just consider that Japan is a cul-de-sac of - say - the Silk Road. You find artefacts from as far away from Japan as Persia in the SjoosooiN　正倉院.　The most typical musical instrument, the kötö, comes in all probability from the same root as the wordｓ guitar ～κυθαρα～ sithar. There are some family　names　which sound very _orientalisch_ （Saburi（佐分利）would be such an　example）


----------



## Fockers

Is there anyone still following this question?


----------



## Daniil

All the languages in the world come from the same source.


----------



## Hulalessar

Daniil said:


> All the languages in the world come from the same source.



No none knows if this is the case or not.


----------



## mataripis

arab and hebrew came from aramaic. i believe, aramaic influenced many modern languages.


----------



## Daniil

I would like to add one more fact. The Arabic word MINA for "port" is very similar to the Japanese word MINATO for "port". This fact needs to be explained. In addition, it is important to find out the original meaning of the words and their etymology.


----------



## nn.om

I'm happy that some people don't think I've asked a stupid question there. 

I must do some kind of contrastive study between Arabic and Japanese when my Japanese improves


----------



## nn.om

Daniil said:


> I would like to add one more fact. The Arabic word MINA for "port" is very similar to the Japanese word MINATO for "port". This fact needs to be explained. In addition, it is important to find out the original meaning of the words and their etymology.


yes I thought minato sounds similar to minaa' too


----------



## rayloom

mataripis said:


> arab and hebrew came from aramaic. i believe, aramaic influenced many modern languages.



Not quite!
Not to venture too far from the main topic:
-Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic are closely related languages, all West Semitic languages. There was also a lot of mutual influence in ancient up until modern times.
-As much as I doubt a direct influence of Arabic on Japanese (or vice versa), I would also doubt (even more actually) a direct influence of Aramaic on Japanese.


----------



## tFighterPilot

Even though the Aramaic (Syriac) alphabet got as far as Mongolia.


----------



## Abu Rashid

mataripis said:


> arab and hebrew came from aramaic. i believe, aramaic influenced many modern languages.



This is just a ludicrous claim. Arabic even today retains more ancient Semitic phonetic and grammatical features than Aramaic did 3000+ years ago. The idea Arabic came from Aramaic indicates a complete lack of knowledge about the Semitic languages.


----------



## Abu Rashid

Daniil said:


> The Arabic word MINA for "port" is very similar to the Japanese word MINATO for "port". This fact needs to be explained.



Why does this need to be explained? Co-incidental word correspondences between different languages are far more common than you might think.


----------



## Daniil

Another example: TORY “bird” in Japanese  and TAYR "bird" in Arabic.


----------



## Daniil

Another example: TORY  “bird” in Japanese  and TAYR "bird" in Arabic.


----------



## killerbee256

My knowledge of East Asia is not very good, did any Arab traders reach japan in the middle ages?


----------



## rayloom

killerbee256 said:


> My knowledge of East Asia is not very good, did any Arab traders reach japan in the middle ages?



Arab traders have reached East Asia quite early on in the Middle Ages.
I'm not sure how much contact there was with Japan. This book (page 43) talks about how Japan was "tangentially" touched by the Arab trade, as evidenced by 8th century Abbasid earthenware uncovered in Nara.

As for the rest of the region:
Here you can find out more about the early contacts between the Arabs and Korea:
http://www.rjkoehler.com/2007/08/23/islam-in-medieval-korea/

Here's the wikipedia entry on the spread of Islam in Indonesia and Southeast Asia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread_of_Islam_in_Indonesia#Early_history


----------



## superherosaves

Is anyone else not freaked out that the indigenous Australians also used the word Dog!


----------



## killerbee256

It is just a coincidence, the older English word for "dog" is hound. It has been talked about these forums before but these coincidences are common between unrelated languages.


----------



## Sepia

superherosaves said:


> Is anyone else not freaked out that the indigenous Australians also used the word Dog!



That would freak me out even more than that Japanese and Arabic have similar words for "port". In prehistoric times they have been separated from the rest of Mankind than any of the others have. However, so have the zoology of their continent. What kind of "dogs" would they have had to use the term "dog" for?

But there are two things we should not forget: The two words that have the most cognates worldwide (according to some Russian professor - I forgot his name) are the words for "milk" and for the number "nine". Personally I am not really surprised because basic words like "food", "milk", "man", "child", are words everybody needed and have been used by humans probably as long as they had a language. The magic number "nine" may surprise us a bit more because it canot have spread any earlier than humans were able to count.

On the other hand: Most of the words we are talking about here are one syllable words. Technically there is a limit to how many words you can make out of approx. 50 phonems of which only 7 or 8 can be considered vowels. (Yes, I am aware that in some languages it is possible to make words without vowels at all, but in a lot, you can't). So it may also be a bit like when composer A claims that composer B stole a sequence out of his music, without taking into consideration that if you compare all songs in a Top 100 Chart, mathematically at least two must have some four to six notes in exactly the same combination. Logically there is also a limit to the number of combinations you can make with a tone scale of eight notes.


----------



## JustKate

superherosaves said:


> Is anyone else not freaked out that the indigenous Australians also used the word Dog!



Freaked out? No. It's kind of cool, though. It's probably a coincidence, as Killerbee and others have pointed out. If anybody has any real evidence aside from the coincidence of a few words here and there, and I'd love to see it.


----------



## إسكندراني

The Arabs had extensive contact with - and settling in - china. I don't know about japan though. Not enough to influence their language as far as I can tell.

as for 'dog', it is interesting that etymonline has no suggestion for where this word came from. It is meant to be 'indigenous' to the british isles.


----------



## superherosaves

I agree with you Iskandarani. The Arabs referred to the land mass east of India as Ṣīn. There are even Chinese Muslims in the northern frontier.


----------



## origumi

rayloom said:


> I'm not sure how much contact there was with Japan. This book (page 43) talks about how Japan was "tangentially" touched by the Arab trade, as evidenced by 8th century Abbasid earthenware uncovered in Nara.


Also Jewish merchants of the time, the Radhanites http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radhanite, who were apparently close culturally to the Arab world, and are known to have traded between most of Europe, most of the Arab world, towards India and China, are not mentioned as reaching Japan.


----------



## superherosaves

I think the coffin has been nailed as to whether or not the Arabs ever Traded with the Japanese:

"A 2005 piece in the Hankyoreh Shinmun by Professor Jeong Su-il looked at the interaction between Koreans and Muslims during the Goryeo era (936-1392)." which proves that nearby Korea was in contact,
"Tangentially, the trade also *touched Japan, as evidenced by the discovery, at Old Port Hakata on Kyushu and at the ancient Nara capital, of ceramic shards linked with the late 8th-century* Islamic Abbasid empire, with its capital in Baghdad," which proves that Japan was also in contact.

The fact that the two cultures traded by sea gives evidence for the hypothesis that 港(Minato) was borrowed from the Arabic ميناء(Meenaa'), meaning port. I wouldn't really call this a false-cognate and would conjecture that a couple of other terms were also borrowed from the Arabs.


----------



## إسكندراني

Two cultures being in contact is no proof for etymology. The japanese and the arabs both had ports before they met each other.

in fact, i doubt the word ميناء is of original arabic origin.


----------



## rbrunner

إسكندراني said:


> Two cultures being in contact is no proof for etymology.



... and just some broken shards somewhere is not even a real proof of contact, if you ask me. The Koreans might have sold to Japanese what they themselves had bought from Arabs, right?


----------



## ProfItroll

Well, I think it's quite funny, and interesting, to note that in Arabic, "he lived/inhabited" is "sakana," which means "fish" in Japanese. Did the Japanese hear about Prophet Jonah, also known as Yunus? After all, didn't he stay in a big fish?


----------



## Finland

These similarities are of course just coincidences, but sometimes indeed funny ones. This reminds me of something completely off-topic, but I'll mention it here anyway: There's a Palestinian band called Fish Samak فيش سمك, which of course means "There's no fish", but they use it because of the funny coincidence that the English "fish" is سمك in Arabic...

S


----------



## Thanderbolten

I would like to add that if I did not know better (maybe I don't?) then the native Japanese word for "word" [*ことば, kotoba*] is a cognate, or at least very similar, to the Arabic word for "book" [*كتاب*, _*kitab*_]. They certainly convey some of the same meaning here. There certainly is something weird about Japanese and Arabic, but one is an isolated Altaic family and another is Afroasiatic, so somewhat impossible. 

Imagine if Japanese is actually Semitic?  One of the lost tribes of Israel?


----------



## MatheusMiotto

Actually this can be possible. The very first people, living in Japan were the tribe AINU  They still exist as gipsy in  few number over China. And their language is a very old PERSIAN > is proven that 99% of legit full japanese have AINU DNA. And a interesting story about them in Japan. There a legend that Jesus Christ past all the of teenage years til the 30s together them in Japan,.


----------



## Exacrion

I have noticed that all those similarities seems to happen with the Yamato kotoba (the original Japanese, prior to chinese influence). However, restricting it to Arabic seems rather ridiculous, similar threads exist here and there about Turkish, Hebrew or Persian having similarities to the Yamato kotoba.

Now, all those languages exist in different famillies (Altaic, Afroasiatic/semitic and Indo-European) but are nonetheless characterised by being geographically close which helps mutual influence. (You can compare that to the influence Chinese had on Japanese). Of the languages involved, Afroasiatic/semitic and Indo-European/Persian are the oldest, having over 5000+ years of attested existence.

Consequently, if there were a link, 2 conditions need to be verified: 1) That at some point in time, people who then eventually migrated to Japan, lived in the Greater Middle-east (or at least their ancestors did). 2) That this influence, rather than being continuous, happened as a burst in pre-historical Japan (possibly due to human migrations).

My opinion on this situation, in that it is possible that some near-eastern hunter gatherer/farmers made their way to Japan via Mongolia, leading to this influence. I remind also that not all languages in the Middle-east fall into the above categories, some are isolate such as Sumerian who could've also acted as a bridge between different language families in the past.

However, aside from the Yamato kotoba, there were some demonstrated Middle-eastern influences on historical (post-chinese) Japan via trade. For instance the drink Shochu falls into that category, being originally called araki or rambiki, a drink known as arak in the middle-east (rambiki is from alambic), in this case those words are written in Katakana which demonstrate their foreign origin. This is also why I think the influence on the basic word was in pre-historical japan, as they are not written in katakana, the influence being prior to the invention of a writing system for the language.


----------



## Tonetus

I came here for similar reasons. I found anta to be related too but also mata as "when" in arabic, which I believe translates into "again" in japanese, so when asking in arabic "when are you coming back", you could replace the meaning with the japanese case and convey the same message. I'll try to research further but I feel like there's more to this connection than chance alone.


----------



## Hulalessar

I think you have to ask yourself this question: Is it likely, on any sort of contact, let alone minimal contact, between Arabs and Japanese whenever it took place that the Japanese would have abandoned their words for "you" and "again" and adopted the Arabic words? Spanish had centuries of contact with Arabic and has many Arabic words (almost all nouns) but never adopted any Arabic word for "you".


----------



## Sepia

Tonetus said:


> I came here for similar reasons. I found anta to be related too but also mata as "when" in arabic, which I believe translates into "again" in japanese, so when asking in arabic "when are you coming back", you could replace the meaning with the japanese case and convey the same message. I'll try to research further but I feel like there's more to this connection than chance alone.



Sounds interesting and I hope you'll come back with your results. However, I wouldn't expect too much of it. Such basic words like when, where, what, who, why, again, never, time etc. are so basic that there was no reason for them to be particarly long words - and therefore they are rather short words in most languages. And it is limited how many words you can actually construct out of two to four phonems, taken into consideration that at least one has to be a vowel and in few languages there are more than five of them. So it is a simple statistical fact that a huge amount of words will sound about the same in various languages - so many that there is a high probability that some also happen to have the same or similar meaning - even though they are in no way related.


----------



## Hulalessar

Tonetus should bear in mind rule 5 of the SEVEN CANONS of ETYMOLOGY of W.W. Skeat, proposed in 1879:

Mere resemblances of form and apparent connection in sense between languages which have different phonetic laws or no necessary connection are commonly a delusion, and are not to be regarded.


----------



## Sepia

Hulalessar said:


> Tonetus should bear in mind rule 5 of the SEVEN CANONS of ETYMOLOGY of W.W. Skeat, proposed in 1879:
> 
> Mere resemblances of form and apparent connection in sense between languages which have different phonetic laws or no necessary connection are commonly a delusion, and are not to be regarded.



Exactly - but I think I didn't just present it as a dogma, but explained logically why. 
Nevertheless, some words DO have cognates in a multitude of languages. There is a linguist in Moskow - I have forgotten his name, but it is the guy who knows at least the basics of well over 100 languages - this linguist has found cognates in a multitude of languages spread all over the Eurasian continent. Top words with the most cognates are words for "milk" and the number "nine". 

So even though we sort of expect that there is no connection between Arabic and Japanese, it would be interesting to know if there really is not even the least trace of a connection. If there were we would probably see it in such words that must have existed in the first languages spoken by humans. So it will be more on the level of eat-drink-man-woman-child-milk-here-there-now-(be)fore than it will be "crocodile" or "pyramid".


----------



## Hulalessar

No one knows when humans first started speaking, but assuming conservatively it was 50,000 years ago that is a very long time when you look at how rapidly languages can change. Irish and Bengali are related but quite different from each other. The furthest we can go back without hypothesising is 5000 years and then only for a tiny number of the world's languages - and even then there are uncertainties about how to interpret ancient texts, especially those not written with alphabetic or syllabic scripts. Families like Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic are the exception rather than the rule.

When comparing two proto-languages you need to bear in mind that you are comparing two hypotheses which puts you on rather shaky ground. If a language family has only been written recently you cannot go as far back with your construction of a proto-language as you can with one which has a millennia-long history. How valid is it to compare a hypothesis that takes you back 7000 years with one which only takes you back a century or two? You also have the problem that languages borrow from each other. If two proto-languages share a lexeme how can you know whether it is because one borrowed from the other or because they had a common ancestor? You have to be careful not to be seduced by apparent resemblances when what is important is correspondences. Semantics are unreliable - if the word in proto-language A for "rope" corresponds with the word in proto-language B for "snake" it may or may not be significant.


----------



## Sepia

Hulalessar said:


> No one knows when humans first started speaking, but assuming conservatively it was 50,000 years ago that is a very long time when you look at how rapidly languages can change. Irish and Bengali are related but quite different from each other. The furthest we can go back without hypothesising is 5000 years and then only for a tiny number of the world's languages - and even then there are uncertainties about how to interpret ancient texts, especially those not written with alphabetic or syllabic scripts. Families like Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic are the exception rather than the rule.
> 
> When comparing two proto-languages you need to bear in mind that you are comparing two hypotheses which puts you on rather shaky ground. If a language family has only been written recently you cannot go as far back with your construction of a proto-language as you can with one which has a millennia-long history. How valid is it to compare a hypothesis that takes you back 7000 years with one which only takes you back a century or two? You also have the problem that languages borrow from each other. If two proto-languages share a lexeme how can you know whether it is because one borrowed from the other or because they had a common ancestor? You have to be careful not to be seduced by apparent resemblances when what is important is correspondences. Semantics are unreliable - if the word in proto-language A for "rope" corresponds with the word in proto-language B for "snake" it may or may not be significant.




But you do agree, that the basic words of a language are usually pretty short, don't you? I mean, even if we do not know how the first humans spoke, there would be little reason to figure out words consisting of several syllables to start with. Of course along the way some words will be more like descriptions. I mean, even though we do not know that by any proof, there is no logical reason that it would be different - and even in languages today we see that in many of them all names of domestic wild animals are very short - wolf, dog, fox, bird, and so on. 

And with short words there is a high probabilty that some words in different languages may sound the same without there being any connection between them.


----------



## pollohispanizado

Hulalessar said:


> Spanish had centuries of contact with Arabic and has many Arabic words (almost all nouns) but never adopted any Arabic word for "you".


_They/them/their_ was a whole pronoun set loaned from Old Norse, which is to say that it _does_ happen; however, I personally find the Arabic-Japanese connection dubious.


----------



## Awwal12

Sepia said:


> Nevertheless, some words DO have cognates in a multitude of languages. There is a linguist in Moskow - I have forgotten his name, but it is the guy who knows at least the basics of well over 100 languages - this linguist has found cognates in a multitude of languages spread all over the Eurasian continent. Top words with the most cognates are words for "milk" and the number "nine".


I am afraid you don't quite understand the word "cognate". Cognates are words of the same origin which come from the common ancestor language. That, by definition, requires the existence of that ancestor language, i.e. a genetic connection between the two languages must be established, otherwise even the probably related words won't be cognates. And establishing the connection between "hundreds languages of Eurasia" is exactly the problem here. While such "megalocomparative linguistics" does exist in science, its results so far have been rather humble; scholars may postulate a lot (take the hypothetical Nostratic language family, for instance), but the respective reconstructions are inconsistent (most typically phonological relationships turn out to be irregular/largely obscure/unrealistically complex). There are a lot of similarities observed in apparantly unrelated languages, more than there should be statistically speaking, but the origin of those similarities is unclear.


----------



## Hulalessar

It is not so much how long words are but how much they change. Two examples:

Latin _aqua _has become French _eau_, pronounced /o/. None of the Latin phonemes have survived.

Latin _filius_ has become Spanish _hijo_, pronounced /ixo/. Only the vowel /i/ has survived.

No way would Cicero have guessed the meanings of _eau _and _hijo_. If changes like that can happen in less than 2000 years, what can happen over a much longer period? When it comes to comparing languages in different groups in the same family only a trained linguist can spot the connections. Irish and Bengali are not mutually intelligible to any degree. Even the Celtic languages Irish and Welsh, estimated to have had a common ancestor some 2500 to 3000 years ago, are not mutually intelligible.


----------



## OBrasilo

nn.om said:
			
		

> They say 'anata' which means 'you.'


That's a compound that was originally a demonstrative: a- + -nata. There's the corresponding _sonata_ and _konata_ as well, as well as the interrogative _donata_, which is the honorific way of asking _who_.
Meanwhile, the Arabic pronoun has a confirmed Semitic origin, with the cognates not always having a _t_, so it can in no way be related to the Japanese pronoun.



> 'Deki' means 'smart.' Don't you think it's so similar to ذكي (thaki) in Arabic?


This is the first time I hear of _deki_ meaning _smart_ in Japanese. The closest I can find for _smart_ is _iki_. Also, _thaki_ would have become _saki_ in Japanese, or maybe _seki_, never _deki_, had it been borrowed, since Arabic _th_ is pronounced the same as English unvoiced _th_, which invariably becomes _s_ when borrowed into Japanese. Also, you can't have _-ki_ become _-ke_ in _sake_ but remaining _-ki_ in _deki_, why would the same syllable taken two different changes when borrowed?



			
				Thanderbolten said:
			
		

> I would like to add that if I did not know better (maybe I don't?) then the native Japanese word for "word" [*ことば, kotoba*] is a cognate, or at least very similar, to the Arabic word for "book" [*كتاب*, _*kitab*_].


Japanese _kotoba_ is again originally a compound, koto- and -ha, -ha only became -ba because of rendaku (which makes even more sense if you consider that _ha_ was originally _pa_ then _fa_, before becoming _ha_).

Now, one could in theory hypothesize _kitab_ was first borrowed into some Turkic language as _kitap_ and then from there to Old Japanese as _kotopa_, before mutating to _kotoha_ then _kotoba_, but the vowels would remain a problem. And the fact _kotoba_ is originally a compound, throws that completely out of the window.



			
				superherosaves said:
			
		

> The fact that the two cultures traded by sea gives evidence for the hypothesis that 港(Minato) was borrowed from the Arabic ميناء(Meenaa'), meaning port.


_Minato_ is also originally a compound, from: mi- (water) + -na- (possessive particle) + -to (gate), so "water's gate", which makes perfect sense for a port. According to Wiktionary:


> Attested in the _Kojiki_ and _Nihon Shoki_ as 水門.


Which proves it's a compoint involving _water_ and _gate_.

Also, the Arabic word has two long vowels, which I seriously doubt would have become short in Japanese, a language with phonemic vowel length. If anything, one would have expected to see _miinaa_, but there is no such word in Japanese.

I think here, just like in the case of supposed Japanese-Turkish relations, there's too much comparison being done between modern Arabic and modern Japanse, ignoring over a millennium of phonetic and semantic changes as well as the original nature of the words being compared. And, just like with Japanese-Turkish, the comparison collapses when even just Old Japanese and Classical Japanese are brought into the picture.


----------



## Sepia

superherosaves said:
The fact that the two cultures traded by sea gives evidence for the hypothesis that 港(Minato) was borrowed from the Arabic ميناء(Meenaa'), meaning port.

Even without the explanation of  港(Minato) being a compound word, I would not have been convinced by this proof. I would say it is enough to arouse curiosity and a good reason to look closer into it - but there are lots of similar correlations that do not in themselves prove anything at all - the mere fact that they traded by sea does not indicate that the Japanese did not have any ports before the Arabs came, and therefore also no reason that they would adopt a foreign word for it.

What I want to point out: A proof can never be superficial. It has to go into depth.


----------



## Hulalessar

pollohispanizado said:


> _They/them/their_ was a whole pronoun set loaned from Old Norse, which is to say that it _does_ happen; however, I personally find the Arabic-Japanese connection dubious.


It depends on how long the contact was and the degree of integration of the populations. Old English and Old Norse were in contact in Britain for a long period. No one knows exactly what happened, but it seems that the Old English speakers were not driven out. There would therefore have been significant communication between the two communities possibly ending in a significant degree of integration with intermarriage. Given that back then there was at least some degree of mutual intelligibility it would not be surprising if there was bilingualism leading to language mixing.

If there is less integration any influence by one language on another tends to be restricted.

If the contact is minimal borrowed words tend to be for things for which you do not have a word.

There was no significant community of Arabic speakers in Japan. The Japanese had ports before any Arabic speaker arrived and did not need a word for port. There was no reason for the Japanese to adopt any Arabic personal pronouns. I have no idea what the Arabic or Japanese is for "date", but if they are similar that is something which would not be surprising.


----------

