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Interesting Chinese/Hungarian similarity | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6768 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 25 of 97 03 September 2007 at 5:27am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm eager to see a demonstration of links between Hungarian and Japanese, partially because I'm pretty sure such links don't exist. :D
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| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7156 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 26 of 97 03 September 2007 at 7:00am | IP Logged | ||
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I can't remember what the exact links were as it has been years since I read that book.
Cap'n, I don't share as much of your skepticism. I do think that there could be links but either they're a) genetic but distant as hell and thus debatable; or b) caused by areal influence between Uralic and Altaic languages (on the assumption that Japanese is an Altaic language). A link between Uralic and Japanese wouldn't surprise me and I'm open to thinking about them, but admittedly, I'm not a comparative linguist, so it's not as if my life's purpose is about classifying languages in one way or another. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Vlad Trilingual Super Polyglot Senior Member Czechoslovakia foreverastudent.com Joined 6584 days ago 443 posts - 576 votes 2 sounds Speaks: Czech*, Slovak*, Hungarian*, Mandarin, EnglishC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Serbian, French Studies: Persian, Taiwanese, Romanian, Portuguese | Message 27 of 97 03 September 2007 at 9:08am | IP Logged | ||
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Captain:
Do you speak any Hungarian? ;-) I mean.. I don't speak any Japanese so we're 50:50, but why do you personally think there are no links at all? Chung: I will try to look up the authors you've mentioned. It seems like an interesting read. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6768 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 28 of 97 03 September 2007 at 9:53am | IP Logged | ||
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No, I don't speak any Hungarian. :) However, the uniqueness of Japanese and the long, distinct, isolated history of its culture I find very interesting, as well as Japan's later cultural relationship with China and Korea.
As a Japanophile, I'm quite interested in the antiquity and origins of the Japanese people. Speculation is fun, but it muddies the water when people try to force a relationship between Japanese and their favourite language — especially one as distant as Hungarian (or Hebrew, a popular one among theorists who don't actually know Japanese). It seems that the less someone knows about comparative linguistics, the more likely they are to insist on a relation — something that probably irks me more than it should. :) Even the Korean relation has been discredited, and the best evidence shows Japanese being related to one or more extinct languages from the Korean peninsula, something I'd like to know more about if the research is ever done. If someone ever showed up with actual evidence of a relationship with Hungarian, I'd clap my hands in glee. But for the moment, it's just one of many hypotheses that can't be taken seriously. No offence to those who speak or study Hungarian, of course. Real comparative linguistics is hard work, and I greatly respect the amazing work linguists have done in identifying the language families we recognize today. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| TDC Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6921 days ago 261 posts - 291 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, French Studies: Esperanto, Ukrainian, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Persian | Message 29 of 97 03 September 2007 at 1:51pm | IP Logged | ||
Barry Farber had this interesting anecdote about this similarity helping him in a really delicate situation.
Edited by TDC on 03 September 2007 at 1:57pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Vlad Trilingual Super Polyglot Senior Member Czechoslovakia foreverastudent.com Joined 6584 days ago 443 posts - 576 votes 2 sounds Speaks: Czech*, Slovak*, Hungarian*, Mandarin, EnglishC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Serbian, French Studies: Persian, Taiwanese, Romanian, Portuguese | Message 30 of 97 03 September 2007 at 2:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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There we go! :-)))
thank you for this post :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ChristopherB Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 6316 days ago 851 posts - 1074 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, German, French | Message 31 of 97 03 September 2007 at 10:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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What about similarities between Finnish and Japanese? I've heard of linguists contemplating possible links between them, for some strange reason.
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| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6768 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 32 of 97 04 September 2007 at 12:15am | IP Logged | ||
This is, I think, the same hypothesis that tries to link Japanese with Hungarian and Turkish in the proposed Altaic group. For the most part, this just seems like an attempt to throw the world's major agglutinative languages in the same basket. Russian linguist Sergei Starostin was one of the main figures behind this idea, I believe, but he didn't actually know Japanese. When it comes to vocabulary, the theory doesn't really pan out, so it's very tentative. It's certainly possible that proto-Japanese had contact and some exchange with early Tungusic languages spoken in Siberia and Mancheria. Those languages might also have had contact with the Turkic languages. But if Japanese were related to Finnish, it should be possible to correlate hundreds of Japanese words with Finnish words via systematic sound shifts. Remember that when we talk about two languages being "related", we're talking about something quite specific: that the two languages shared a common origin in ancient times, and then gradually diverged through phonetic and grammatical shifts. The best current theory is that Japanese came from the Korean peninsula in antiquity, and was related to the language of the ancient kingdom of Goguryeo (but was not related to Korean). Edited by Captain Haddock on 04 September 2007 at 12:23am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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