The Connections Project

Japanese

The Japanese language borrows a lot of words from English.

French and Japanese are very distant in the language family tree. Besides some obscure cognates, there is very little in common between the two.

Japanese borrowed the Chinese characters from Mandarin, though because of two different paths of evolution, the Japanese kanji are now slightly different from the Mandarin hanzi. Unlike Mandarin, Japanese mixes the characters with two syllabaries, the hiragana and katakana. While both languages are tonal, the tones in Japanese are somewhat less "important" than the ones in Mandarin. Japanese borrowed many technical words from Mandarin (although they are heavily altered in the process because of the very different sound systems). Grammatically, these two languages are extremely different. Most people would agree that Japanese grammar is much harder, which Mandarin in turn has the harder phonology.

There are close grammatical similarities between Korean and Japanese. Korean uses sentence-ending particles which are similar to those in Japanese. Phonetically, though, the two languages are quite distant from each other, with Korean containing a lot more distinct sounds than Japanese.

Although Esperanto attempts to share cognates with as many languages as possible, it doesn't share many with Japanese. It seems Japanese wasn't even particularly considered in the design of Esperanto. For example, the Esperanto stem "vid" ("see") could just as well have been "mir", which would still be a cognate for the usual romance languages but would also be a convenient false cognate with Japanese "miru", but it seems this kind of thing was completely neglected. The two languages have radically different writing systems. Their phonologies are also very different, but (like Spanish) Esperanto's vowels roughly do correspond to Japanese vowels.