Is Japanese related to LATIN, in how verbs were formed???

Question

Japanese has many -ERU -IRU -ARU verbs
Romance languages like spanish has
-ER -IR -AR. French has -ER -IR -OIR

Could there have been a LATIN connection in the past?

Answer 1

NO. Japanese is completely unrelated to Latin and the similarities are completely due to chance. There was no historical contact between the two languages.

People would be very surprised to see how much chance resemblance there is between any two languages on the planet. For example, between English and the native American language Shoshoni we find: come/kimma, moon/müa, ekweorna (Old English 'squirrel'/ekkwün. My favorite coincidence is Mohawk ostyun, Greek osteon 'bone'.

Grammatical coincidences like those you point out between Latin and Japanese are also quite common.

EDIT to correct errors in previous and following answers: Chinese and Japanese are completely unrelated. The person who said "Japanese is rooted in Chinese" is completely wrong. "Nostratic" is not a widely accepted hypothesis and Japanese is not generally believed to belong to a putative "Altaic" family (also unproven). The specifics of the verb endings in Latin are NOT derived from Proto-Indo-European, so even IF Japanese and Latin were distantly related, the verb endings would not be evidence of this since the Latin verb endings are innovations within the Italic branch of Indo-European.

Answer 2

Latin and Japanese belong to two different linguistic families.

Latin belongs to a larger Indo-European family which includes English, Celtic, German and Russian too, while Japanese belongs to a larger Ural-Altaic family which included Korean, Mongolian, Turkish, even Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian.

Some linguists think that these two families are distantly related and call the common hypothetical ancestor "Nostratic" or "Eurasiatic." They believe it was spoken somewhere in Central Asia about 8,000 to 10,000 years ago.

Your examples of similarities are most likely coincidences however one still cannot be 100% sure. A small possibilty exists that both the Latin and Japanese verbal forms might have originated somehow in a common Nostratic form.

Reconstructing Nostratic is one of those things linguists are still working on but very slowly. Unfortunately, the ones who are working on it encounter a lot of hostility, opposition and just plain old-fashioned jelousy from other linguists.

Latin and Japanese are both similar typologically in some ways in that both languages do not have the rigid rules of word order that English and Chinese have. In other words, their grammars are more elastic and the verb can appear near the beginning or at the end of a sentence.

Answer 3

There is a theory for Universal Language but currently, there's not much evidence to support it. It says that a long time ago, all the language decended from a universal language. Japanese is known though to be related to Korean (sister languages) but Korean and Japanese are thought to be an isolated group. Not in anyway related to Chinese. Japanese is also at times refered to as a pacific language, similar to Hawaiian (not based on the structure of the language but the prounciation.)

Answer 4

Regular? I think you might be a bit confused. :) There are three verb types, Ichidan (tabemasu - taberu) Godan (ikimasu-iku) and irregular. There are only a handful of irregular verbs and if you're good with languages only those few irregular ones require straight out memorization.

Answer 5

Nope, Japanese is not one of the 5 romance languages which decended from Latin.

Answer 6

japanese is actually rooted in chinese. (but the Japanese won't tell you that because they don't like the chinese)

eru iru and aru are actually names...

Fujiama...means Mount Fuji...so saying Mount Fujiama is like sayng Mountain, Mountain

Maru means ship..so saying Mara Maru is ok..but saying the ship Mara maru, is like saying ship ship

Answer 7

no relation to latin

Answer 8

wishful thinking :-)