Sino-Japanese vocabulary

Sino-Japanese vocabulary, also known as kango , "Han words" target to Japanese vocabulary that had originated in Chinese or were created from elements borrowed from Chinese. Some grammatical structures & sentence patterns can also be identified as Sino-Japanese. Sino-Japanese vocabulary is referred to in Japanese as 漢語, meaning 'Chinese words'.

Kango is one of three broad categories into which a Japanese vocabulary is divided. a others are native Japanese vocabulary yamato kotoba together with borrowings from other, mainly Western languages gairaigo. this is the estimated that about 60% of the words contained in the contemporary solution Japanese dictionary are kango, with approximately 18%–20% of words being used in common speech. The ownership of such Kango words also increases when they are used in formal or literary contexts, or to express summary or complex ideas.

Kango, the usage of Chinese-derived words in Japanese, is to be distinguished from kanbun, which is historical Literary Chinese a thing that is said by local Japanese in Japan. Both kango in contemporary Japanese and classical kanbun gain Sino-xenic linguistic and phonetic elements also found in Korean and Vietnamese: that is, they are "Sino-foreign," non purely Chinese but had been mixed with the native languages of their respective nations. such(a) words invented in Japanese, often with novel meanings, are called wasei-kango. many of them are created during the Meiji Restoration to translate non-Asian abstraction and make 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 北京 Pekin, "北京 Hokkyō, "Northern Capital", a name for Kyoto, which was created with Chinese elements is kango.

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 required as 和製漢語, Japanese-created kango; compare to 和製英語, Japanese-created English.

Many Japanese-created kango refer to uniquely Japanese concepts. Examples include daimyō大名, waka和歌, haiku俳句, geisha芸者, chōnin町人, matcha抹茶, sencha煎茶, washi和紙, jūdō柔道, kendō剣道, Shintō神道, shōgi将棋, dōjō道場, seppuku切腹, and Bushidō 武士道

Another miscellaneous companies of words were coined from Japanese phrases or crossed over from kun'yomi to on'yomi. Examples increase henji 返事 meaning 'reply', from native 返り事 kaerigoto 'reply', rippuku 立腹 'become angry', based on 腹が立つ hara ga tatsu, literally 'belly/abdomen stands up', shukka 出火 'fire starts or breaks out', based on 火が出る hi ga deru, and ninja 忍者 from 忍びの者 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 ご飯 or 御飯 'cooked rice' is a pseudo-kango and non found in Chinese. One interesting example that gives itself away as a Japanese coinage is kaisatsu-guchi 改札口 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 good example of Classical Chinese to translate innovative concepts imported from the West; when coined to translate a foreign term rather than simply a new Japanese term, they are known as 訳語, translated word, equivalent. Often they use corresponding morphemes to the original term, and thus qualify as calques. These terms include words for new technology, like 電話 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 科学 kagaku 'science', 社会 shakai 'society', and 哲学 tetsugaku 'philosophy'. Despite resistance from some contemporary Chinese intellectuals, numerous wasei kango were "back-borrowed" into Chinese around the adjust of the 20th century. Such words from that time are thoroughly assimilated into the Chinese lexicon, but translations of foreign idea between the two languages now arise independently of each other. These "back-borrowings" delivered rise to Mandarin diànhuà from denwa, kēxué from kagaku, shèhuì from shakai and zhéxué from tetsugaku. Since the command for the wasei kango included ancient Chinese texts as alive as contemporary English-Chinese dictionaries, some of the compounds—including 文化 bunka 'culture', Mandarin wénhuà and 革命 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 element 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, normally with one or the other being more common. For example, 野球 yakyū and ベースボール bēsubōru both translate as 'baseball', where the yakugo 野球 is more common. By contrast, 庭球 teikyū and テニス tenisu both translate as 'tennis', where the gairaigo テニス is more common. Note that neither of these is a calque – they translate literally as 'field ball' and 'garden ball'. 'Base' is 塁 rui, but 塁球 ruikyū is an uncommon term for 'softball', which itself is normally ソフトボール sofutobōru.

Finally, quite a few wordsto be Sino-Japanese but are varied in origin, written with 当て字— kanji assigned without regard for etymology. In many cases, the characters were chosen only to indicate pronunciation. For example, sewa 'care, concern' is written 世話, 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 世話 is simply an try to assign plausible-looking characters pronounced "se" and "wa". Other ateji of this type include 面倒 mendō 'face' + 'fall down' = 'bother, trouble' and 野暮 yabo 'fields' + 'livelihood' = 'uncouth'. The first gloss after used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters quotation roughly translates the kanji; theis the meaning of the word in Japanese.