In history, China and Japan have many kinds of interactions between each other. One of the most well-known events is the “Japanese missions to Imperial China” during the Tang dynasty of China. During that period, the Tang Empire was the most powerful country in the region and the Japanese sent their envoys to China, learning and adapting Chinese culture, including the Chinese written language. The Japanese and Chinese languages are very different. How is it possible that Japanese people were able to develop their language with the influence of Chinese written language?
Before the adaptation, the written language of Chinese and Japanese are different. As to Chinese, it has only one exclusive word system. Unlike English, it does not use alphabets. Instead, each Chinese character, also known as hanzi, represents one word. Japanese, on the other hand, uses kana. Each kana character represents one syllable and different combinations of characters form different words. Kana includes two systems, hiragana and katakana, and these are used in different conditions. But they function the same. Already, the two languages were different to begin with.
From the adaptation, the Japanese learned to use hanzi from the Chinese, but in a different way. The way the Chinese use hanzi, as I mentioned, is to use hanzi characters directly to be words and to have their own meanings. The Japanese version of hanzi is called kanji. The reason for this adaptation is because kana characters don’t have meanings but only sounds. Although most kanji characters are complex to write, they can be easily understood since they themselves include concepts. Also, using kanji can shorten sentences. For example, the word “car” in kana is written “くるま” and in kanji is written “車”. In fact, all Japanese words can be written in kanji. However, kana is needed for grammatical particles and modifiers. Therefore, while Chinese sentences consist of only hanzi, Japanese sentences are constructed by kana and kanji.
The adaptation from Chinese also influenced the pronunciation in Japanese. It’s possible for one Chinese hanzi character to have different ways to pronounce. It’s because Chinese is a tonal language. There are five tones in Chinese and there are some words that can use different tones or even different pronunciations when carrying out different meanings. As to Japanese, originally, each word has only one way to pronounce. But during the adaptation, Japanese people also brought back the Chinese pronunciation. “Kun yomi” means the original Japanese pronunciation and “on yomi” means the Chinese version to pronounce words. For example, when the word “山” is alone in a phrase, it is pronounced as “yama” in kun yomo. But, when it’s along with other words, like in “富士山”, then the phrase should be pronounced as “Fuji San” in on yomi. So, some words in Japanese have two types of ways to be pronounced, the original Japanese way and the Chinese way.
In conclusion, Chinese and Japanese are very different languages, just like many others. Even though the Japanese have learned hanzi from the Chinese, they adapted and changed it into kanji with their own uses. The meanings of the words may be similar, but the functions, such as sentence structure and pronunciation, are drastically different.
References:
Sapore di Cina. (2019). Similarities and Differences Between Chinese and Japanese. Retrieved from https://www.saporedicina.com/english/similarities-differences-chinese-japanese/
Sapore di Cina. (2016). Our Complete Guide to Pinyin (拼音). Retrieved from https://www.saporedicina.com/english/pinyin-guide/
East Asia Student. (2013). 'Hanzi and kanji: differences in the Chinese and Japanese character sets today'. Retrieved from https://eastasiastudent.net/regional/hanzi-and-kanji/
Wikipedia. (2019). Japanese missions to Imperial China. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_missions_to_Imperial_China
JapanToday. (2016). Why does Japanese writing need three different sets of characters? Retrieved from https://japantoday.com/category/features/why-does-japanese-writing-need-three-different-sets-of-characters
Network Languages. (2014). The Similarities Between Chinese and Japanese. Retrieved from https://www.networklanguages.com/the-similarities-between-chinese-and-japanese