[green-bottle]

I feel that you are making a mistake that many native language speakers make in saying that their language has a complex nonlinear history compared to other languages which they happen to not know much about.

It just seems so for native speakers as they know a lot more about the history of their language than others.

English speakers seem particularly susceptible to it since its lineage has been extensively studied.

It may also just seem so to me since I hang around primarily in the English speaking Internet.

[wegwerfbar]

> I feel that you are making a mistake that many native language speakers make in saying that their language has a complex nonlinear history compared to other languages which they happen to not know much about.

But it also seems to actually be the case for english https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/06/28/english-loanwor...

“ In the Max Planck Institute’s World Loanword Database, Mandarin Chinese has the lowest percentage of borrowings of all 41 languages studied, only 2 percent. (English, with one of the highest, has 42 percent.) In part because of the difficulty of translating alphabet-based languages into Chinese characters”

English just does has more loanwords than most other european (and proto-indo-european) languages. And this isn’t an artefact of spanish or german or what have you having been studied less. (Though I fully admit that giving Japanese as an example of a more monocultural language in this context is a poor choice given how many non-native words it borrowed from Chinese).

[stakkur]

>> Though I fully admit that giving Japanese as an example of a more monocultural language in this context is a poor choice given how many non-native words it borrowed from Chinese

Japanese did (and does) use Chinese characters.

But Japanese, in fact, is a perfect example of a language that developed in a very monocultural way; it developed in a single region, and:

"Japanese is classified as a member of the Japonic languages or as a language isolate with no known living relatives " from:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_language#Current_theo...

A 'language isolate' is a language that has no known genealogical relationship with other outside languages. Japanese developed as a fairly isolated language. Only since the 1850s has the Japanese borrowing of loanwords really took off, and those are mostly limited to English words for technology and other more 'modern' objects.

[wegwerfbar]

Hi, thanks for your reply. Your remarks about its genetic lineage and development in a single area are spot on and relevant.

> Only since the 1850s has the Japanese borrowing of loanwords really took off, and those are mostly limited to English words[...]

Are you sure you meant to say English? [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Japanese_vocabulary - though even the article you linked specifically says it has a large portion of Chinese loans ]. Though Chinese borrowing started in the 4th century into Japanese, so - are you saying Japanese borrowings from Chinese particularly accelerated in the 1850s (If you could find some source for this claim, it’d be appreciated - I wasn’t able to find one and it seems unlikely, given that this was the point at which it started to lean more European in terms of its borrowings)? To my knowledge English borrowings in Japanese are modern (after WW2). I’m confused!

[jhanschoo]

Being a language isolate or not doesn't say anything about how diverse the influences of a language's current structure and vocabulary, or its speakers' societies, might be. See my cousin comment.