Sino-Japanese vocabulary

Sino-Japanese vocabulary or refers to that portion of the Japanese vocabulary that originated in Chinese or has been created from elements borrowed from Chinese. Some grammatical structures and sentence patterns can also be identified as Sino-Japanese. Sino-Japanese vocabulary is referred to in Japanese as , meaning 'Chinese words'. "Kango" is one of three broad categories into which the Japanese vocabulary is divided. The others are native Japanese vocabulary ("yamato kotoba") and borrowings from other, mainly Western languages ("gairaigo"). It is estimated that approximately 60% of the words contained in a modern Japanese dictionary are "kango", but they comprise only about 18% of words used in speech.
"Kango", the use of Chinese-derived words in Japanese, is to be distinguished from "kanbun", which is historical Literary Chinese written by Japanese in Japan. Both "kango" in modern Japanese and classical "kanbun" have Sino-xenic linguistic and phonetic elements also found in Korean and Vietnamese: that is, they are "Sino-foreign," not purely Chinese. Such words invented in Japanese, often with novel meanings, are called wasei-kango. Many of them are created during the modernization of Japan to translate Western concepts and have been reborrowed into Chinese.
"Kango" is also to be distinguished from "gairaigo" of Chinese origin, namely words borrowed from modern Chinese dialects, some of which may be occasionally spelled with Chinese characters or "kanji" just like "kango". For example, ("Pekin", "Beijing") which was borrowed from a modern Chinese dialect is not "kango", but ("Hokkyō", "Northern Capital", a name for Kyoto), which was created with Chinese elements is "kango".
Background.
Ancient China's enormous political and economic influence in the region had a deep effect on Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and other East Asian languages throughout history, in a manner somewhat similar the preeminent position that Greek and Latin had in European history. For example, the Middle Chinese word for gunpowder, (), is rendered as "hwayak" in Korean, and as "kayaku" in Japanese. At the time of their first contact, the existing Japanese language had no writing system, while the Chinese had a written language and a great deal of academic and scientific information, providing new concepts along with Chinese words to express them. Chinese became the language of science, learning, religion and government. The earliest written language to be used in Japan was literary Chinese, which has come to be called "kanbun" in this context. The "kanbun" writing system essentially required every literate Japanese to be competent in written Chinese, although it is unlikely that many Japanese people were then fluent in spoken Chinese. Chinese pronunciation was approximated in words borrowed from Chinese into Japanese; this Sino-Japanese vocabulary is still an important component of the Japanese language, and may be compared to words of Latin or Greek origin in English.
Chinese borrowings also significantly impacted Japanese phonology, leading to many new developments such as closed syllables (CV(N), not just CV) and length becoming a phonetic feature with the development of both long vowels and long consonants. (See Early Middle Japanese: Phonological developments for details.)
Grammar.
Sino-Japanese words are almost exclusively nouns, of which many are verbal nouns or adjectival nouns, meaning that they can act as verbs or adjectives. Verbal nouns can be used as verbs by appending (e.g. ), while an adjectival noun uses instead of (usual for nouns) when acting attributively.
In Japanese, verbs and adjectives (that is, inflecting adjectives) are closed classes, and despite the large number of borrowings from Chinese, virtually none of these became inflecting verbs or adjectives, instead being conjugated periphrastically as above.
In addition to the basic verbal noun + "suru" form, verbal nouns with a single-character root often experienced sound changes, such as → → , as in , and some cases where the stem underwent sound change, as in , from .
Sino-Japanese and "on'yomi".
The term kango is usually identified with , a system of pronouncing Chinese characters in a way that at one point approximated the original Chinese. On'yomi is also known as the 'Sino-Japanese reading', and is opposed to under which Chinese characters are assigned to, and read as, native Japanese vocabulary.
However, there are cases where the distinction between on'yomi and kun'yomi does not correspond to etymological origin. Chinese characters created in Japan, called , normally only have kun'yomi, but some kokuji do have on'yomi. One such character is (as in "hataraku", "to work"), which was given the on'yomi "dō" (from the on'yomi of its phonetic component, ) when used in compounds with other characters, e.g. in "rōdō" ("labor"). Similarly, the character ("gland") has the on'yomi "sen" (from the on'yomi of its phonetic component, "sen" "spring, fountain"), e.g. in "hentōsen" "tonsils"; it was intentionally created as a "kango" and does not have a kun'yomi at all. Although not originating in Chinese, both of these are regarded as 'Sino-Japanese'.
By the same token, that a word is the kun'yomi of a kanji is not a guarantee that the word is native to Japanese. There are a few Japanese words that, although they appear to have originated in borrowings from Chinese, have such a long history in the Japanese language that they are regarded as native and are thus treated as kun'yomi, e.g., "uma" "horse" and "ume". These words are not regarded as belonging to the Sino-Japanese vocabulary.
Words 'made in Japan'.
While much Sino-Japanese vocabulary was borrowed from Chinese, a considerable amount was created by the Japanese themselves as they coined new words using Sino-Japanese forms. These are known as ; compare to .
Many Japanese-created kango refer to uniquely Japanese concepts. Examples include , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and "Bushidō" (武士道)
Another miscellaneous group of words were coined from Japanese phrases or crossed over from "kun'yomi" to "on'yomi". Examples include "henji" ( meaning 'reply', from native "kaerigoto" 'reply'), "rippuku" ( 'become angry', based on "hara ga tatsu", literally 'belly/abdomen stands up'), "shukka" ( 'fire starts or breaks out', based on "hi ga deru"), and "ninja" ( from "shinobi-no-mono" meaning 'person of stealth'). In Chinese, the same combinations of characters are often meaningless or have a different meaning. Even a humble expression like "gohan" ( or 'cooked rice') is a pseudo-"kango" and not found in Chinese. One interesting example that gives itself away as a Japanese coinage is "kaisatsu-guchi" ( literally 'check ticket gate'), meaning the ticket barrier at a railway station.
More recently, the best-known example is the prolific numbers of kango coined during the Meiji era on the model of Classical Chinese to translate modern concepts imported from the West; when coined to translate a foreign term (rather than simply a new Japanese term), they are known as . Often they use corresponding morphemes to the original term, and thus qualify as calques. These terms include words for new technology, like "denwa" ('telephone'), and words for Western cultural categories which the Sinosphere had no exact analogue of on account of partitioning the semantic fields in question differently, such as "kagaku" ('science'), "shakai" ('society'), and "tetsugaku" ('philosophy'). Despite resistance from some contemporary Chinese intellectuals, many "wasei kango" were "back-borrowed" into Chinese around the turn of the 20th century. Such words from that time are thoroughly assimilated into the Chinese lexicon, but translations of foreign concepts between the two languages now occur independently of each other. These "back-borrowings" gave rise to Mandarin "diànhuà" (from "denwa"), "kēxué" (from "kagaku"), "shèhuì" (from "shakai") and "zhéxué" (from "tetsugaku"). Since the sources for the "wasei kango" included ancient Chinese texts as well as contemporary English-Chinese dictionaries, some of the compounds—including "bunka" ('culture', Mandarin "wénhuà") and "kakumei" ('revolution', Mandarin "gémìng")—might have been independently coined by Chinese translators, had Japanese writers not coined them first. A similar process of reborrowing occurred in the modern Greek language, which took back words like τηλεγράφημα "telegrafíma" ('telegram') that were coined in English from Greek roots. Many of these words have also been borrowed into Korean and Vietnamese, forming (a modern Japanese) part of their Sino-Korean and Sino-Vietnamese vocabularies.
Alongside these translated terms, the foreign word may be directly borrowed as gairaigo. The resulting synonyms have varying use, usually with one or the other being more common. For example, "yakyū" and "bēsubōru" both translate as 'baseball', where the yakugo is more common. By contrast, "teikyū" and "tenisu" both translate as 'tennis', where the gairaigo is more common. Note that neither of these is a calque – they translate literally as 'field ball' and 'garden ball'. ('Base' is "rui", but "ruikyū" is an uncommon term for 'softball', which itself is normally "sofutobōru").
Finally, quite a few words appear to be Sino-Japanese but are varied in origin, written with — kanji assigned without regard for etymology. In many cases, the characters were chosen only to indicate pronunciation. For example, "sewa" ('care, concern') is written , using the "on'yomi" "se" + "wa" ('household/society' + 'talk'); although this word is not Sino-Japanese but a native Japanese word believed to derive from "sewashii", meaning 'busy' or 'troublesome'; the written form is simply an attempt to assign plausible-looking characters pronounced "se" and "wa". Other "ateji" of this type include "mendō" ('face' + 'fall down' = 'bother, trouble') and "yabo" ('fields' + 'livelihood' = 'uncouth'). (The first gloss after each character roughly translates the kanji; the second is the meaning of the word in Japanese.)
Phonetic correspondences between Modern Chinese and "on'yomi".
At first glance, the "on'yomi" of many Sino-Japanese words do not resemble the Modern Standard Chinese pronunciations at all. Firstly, the borrowings occurred in three main waves, with the resulting sounds identified as , , and ; these were at different periods over several centuries, from different stages in Historical Chinese phonology, and thus source pronunciations differ substantially depending on time and place. Beyond this, there are two main reasons for the divergence between Modern Standard Chinese and Modern Standard Japanese pronunciations of cognate terms:
Nonetheless, the correspondences between the two are fairly regular. As a result, Sino-Japanese can be viewed as a (transformed) "snapshot" of an archaic period of the Chinese language, and as a result is very important for comparative linguists as it provides a large amount of evidence for the reconstruction of Middle Chinese.
The following is a rough guide to equivalencies between modern Chinese words and modern Sino-Japanese "on'yomi" readings.
Unless otherwise noted, in the list below, sounds shown in quotation marks or italics indicate the usage of non-IPA romanization such as Hanyu pinyin for Mandarin Chinese and Hepburn romanization for Japanese. Symbols shown within slashes or square brackets, like or , are .
Chart of correspondences.
Note:
Initials:
Finals:
Later developments of diphthongs:
Examples.
Notes: