All languages have similarities, whether in writing, grammar, speech, or in some words. In this article, we will present the similarities that the Japanese language has with other languages such as Chinese, Portuguese, English, Korean, and others.
While studying Japanese, I realized that it has characteristics of several languages. This can happen due to history, influence, importation, and even by chance due to results of the collective unconscious.
What is the benefit of knowing the languages that have similarities with Japanese? Perhaps you are a curious polyglot, or you want to find similar languages. I hope you enjoy this article and share it with your friends.
Table of Contents
Similarities of Japanese with Chinese
Many times people end up thinking that the Japanese and Chinese languages are the same thing. There are plenty of reasons; Japanese uses most of the ideograms from traditional Chinese and also imported most of its words.
But this is one of the only few similarities with the Chinese language because the pronunciation and some spelling rules change completely. The only thing that remains besides the ideograms is the simplicity.
Chinese is a tonal language, while Japanese has few pre-defined syllables where the sound does not change at all. The way Chinese people speak is completely different from Japanese. Japanese writing also has two other syllabic alphabets that mix with the ideograms imported from China.
Similarities of Japanese with German
What is the similarity between the Japanese language and German? Have you noticed the huge and complicated words in the German language? They are combinations of small words that form others, which sometimes have very different meanings.
Like German, Japanese is a language that combines words to form others. There are many similar languages, but German is one of the most popular when it comes to combining words.
Just like in German, when referring to just one specific thing in Japanese, the word is written together using ideograms. Both German and Japanese combine words to form new ideas.
Sometimes it may seem confusing because the Japanese language does not have spaces, but the similarities are visible, and it was one of the first things I noticed when learning Japanese.
Similarities of Japanese with sign language
Japanese can be similar to sign languages for two reasons: first, the simplicity of the language, and also because of the signs that represent images in the mind, just like the ideograms do.
Sign language has a simple grammar and language. There are thousands of languages with a simple language, but the most similar to Japanese is sign language.
Similarities of Japanese with Korean
The Japanese and Korean languages share several similarities, such as the SOV grammar (subject + object + verb), typology, honorifics, prefix verbs, etc. One of the differences between Japanese and Korean is that Korean grammar is much more difficult than Japanese.
About 40% of the Korean vocabulary has similarities with the Japanese language. Like Japan, Korea was influenced by the Chinese language. Korea also influenced the Japanese language, and in the same way, Japan influenced Korea in some way.
Korean writing is completely different from Japanese writing, but they share the same idea. While Japan simplified its language by creating hiragana and katakana, Korea completely removed the ideograms by creating its own writing system.
Similarities of Japanese with Portuguese
The Portuguese language had a lot of influence on the Japanese language. The Portuguese arrived in Japan around 1542-1543, being the first Europeans to establish a continuous and direct flow of trade between Japan and Europe.
Over the years, it is speculated that more than 4,000 Japanese words were influenced by the Portuguese language and the Portuguese. Therefore, we have many similar words in both languages.
It is believed that the tenten and maru (accentuation that changes the Japanese syllable) were created solely because of the foreign Portuguese who lived in Japan.
Words like glass, alcohol, button, swing, flask, Jesus, cover, cup, cross, bread, and tobacco are used in the Japanese language adapted to katakana writing.
Read our article about Portuguese words imported into Japanese.
Similarities of Japanese with English
Like Portuguese, Japan has been greatly influenced by the English language in recent centuries. Nowadays, most inventions and things that have appeared have their names derived from English.
These borrowed words from English are called wasei-eigo, something similar happens quite often in the Portuguese language, where we say downloads, hashtag, update, outdoor, and smartphone.
If 4,000 words of Portuguese origin in Japanese is a lot, the English have influenced much more. Words like apartment, elevator, underwear, panties, ice cream, animation, butter, milk, dormitories, building, computer, table, driver, fight, and Christmas were imported from English.
Read our article about English words imported into Japanese.
Similarities of Japanese with Tupi-Guarani
For some reason, various linguistic families of Tupi-Guarani have striking similarities with the Japanese language. Words like wall, rain, restless, and wildflowers have almost identical pronunciation.
It is not enough to have a similar pronunciation; Tupi-Guarani and Japanese have similar words with the same or similar meaning. Sometimes not only the words but even Japanese grammar resembles Tupi-Guarani.
In Japanese, there is the demonstrative pronoun ano (あの), while in Tupi there are the demonstrative pronouns aõ and anõi. Are these similarities a coincidence, or was there some deviation in history that united these two distant nations?
Read our article about the similarities of Japanese with Tupi-Guarani.
Similarities of Japanese with Hebrew
Some insist on saying that the Hebrews influenced Japan in some way, both in history and in the political system and language. We will not discuss this here because scholars completely contradict such a belief.
Still, there are small similarities between the Hebrew language and the Japanese language. This happens both in writing and in pronunciation, but there is a scientific explanation for such coincidences.
The explanation for this theory is what we call collective unconscious. It consists of the idea that we all inherit tendencies, functional traits, virtual images, which would be common to all human beings. This explains various coincidences around the world.
Similarities of Japanese with other languages
Besides the mentioned ones, other scholars create theories about the similarity of Japanese and other languages. Some claim that Japanese phonology is similar to that of Austronesian languages like Creole language.
Other researchers have tried to link Japanese with Indo-European languages, Dravidian languages, and other Euro-Asian languages. There are some similarities between Altaic languages like Turkish, Mongolian, and others.
I do not rule out any possibility of these languages influencing each other. In a direct, indirect way, or through the collective unconscious.
And you? Do you know any other language that has similarities with Japanese? Leave your comment on this subject and share it with your friends!
Leave a Reply