Off topic question?

[Amego]

ya.. why did the japs take our chinese characters and added their hiragana and katakana?... japs were probably once chinese..

uh..japanese?? ew..

neway, aren't we all the same ppl.....

Erm...this is a common misconception....well the following except e 1st paragraph, is written by me in another thread....i lazy ma..so i lifted e entire thingy....

Hello everyone,
I think that Cantonese originally weren't Chinese.
"Why?" you might ask. Well, for starters, if you look at the maps of ancient China, the Cantonese regions weren't even taken over until the Qin dynasty. Plus, look at the similarity between the way we (the Cantonese) say "yes" compared to the Japanese.
What do you think?


ok firstly e word "hai" in Cantonese is from the word 係 and has nothing to do with e Japanese "hai"...its pure coincidence...

and there is a common misconception...Japanese is one languange that is "not related to any other languages in the world" (quoted from 1 site)
unlike Chinese "which has tonnes of sister languages".

Japanese began speaking Japanese long before Chinese noticed their prescence...but there was one problem...Japanese spoke only...they din write...WHY? Because they don have a writing system!!!! A bit lame right?

Therefore the Japanese realised that they need to write...and they borrowed thousands of words from Chinese...sharing some pronounciations...BUT in terms of phoenetics, sentence structures, tenses n so on , we can see that its extremely unique n different from Chinese...

Therefore it is important to realise that Japanese existed for thousands of years before e borrowing of Chinese charactors to WRITE...n note that those wormy (hiragana) & angular (katakana) characters used in japanese originated from Chinese characters too!!!!

jus a little example to illustrate my point...ok

before Chinese arrived...Japanese called a tree "ki"

den the Chinese arrived...a tree is still called "ki" BUT it has been assigned a character "木".

but e Japanese decided that they needed another pronounciation for e Chinese derived word "木"...perhaps they wanted to acknowledge the Chinese for their effort....or to expand they vocab or for other thingy...

so they have a Sino-Japanese pronounciation for "木" (muk6) which is boku...hahah i know...it sounds like hokkien...but its juz coincidence...bear with me...

therefore...
木----ki (kun-reading) (common)
boku (on-reading) (only used with some borrowed words)

so in everyday Japanese life, when a kid sees a tree he exclaims to his parents,

"ki da!" but not
"boku da!"

"This is a tree!"

"Li6 por2 hai6 xu6!"

In a nutshell, Japanese has no cousins. =p

So...yeppy...hope u all can gain some insights =)

[Guest]

Don't argue for the non-sense. The Bai-Yue existed around the Yangtze River for a long time before the coming of the Han (Huang He River). Cantonese and Vietnamese were the parallel line of descendents from the Bai-Yue. At the time of Lac Long Quan, Lac Viet included the Cantonese and Vietnamese people at that time. The Chinese that they are speaking today is the Mandarin from the North, not the South. Most of the Chinese culture and great economic performance came from the South China, not the North. It's not unusual to believe that South Chinese culture and Vietnamese share similarities. Some day, I will get it back. Don't be bowed to the Northern Chinese if you are the Cantonese. YOu have to fight what you stand for

[Guest]

Autumn=Thu = Cau
Winer = Dong = Doong

[qrasy]

[quote="Amego"]
therefore...
?----ki (kun-reading) (common)
boku (on-reading) (only used with some borrowed words)
[\quote]
also read 'moku'