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by stakkur
2078 days ago
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>> 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. |
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> 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!