Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese language origin?

Question

To you linguists what language family do you think each one belongs too. I dont think any of them belong to Sino-Tibetan, and I dont see how people think Korean and Japanese can be Austronesian while Vietnam is closer to Austronesian languages, and I also think Vietnam is more cculturally related to Austronesian than Korea or Japan, because I read that Korea is considered Austronesian because they think people came from eggs, like Austronesians, well the Vietnamese did too, so what language family do you think each one comes from

Answer 1

I like the term "Malayo-Polynesian" better than Austronesian even though it is a broader term. Malayo-Polynesian languages stretch from Madagascar near Africa, to Hawaii and Easter Island in the Pacific. The ancesteral home of these languages was probably in India or Thailand though a few scholars have tried to place it among ancient farming communities in southern China.

Vietnamese would be part of this group. It is a known fact that Vietnamese is distantly related to Indonesian and the languages of the Philippines, while these languages in turn, are distantly related to Polynesian languages like Samoan, Maori and Hawaiian. Vietnamese may also be distantly related to Thai on the other side of the linguistic divide.

Korean and Japanese are usually classified as independent Asia languages but there is mounting evidence that the two languages are distantly related to each other and to the Ural-Altaic group of languages which includes even some European languages like Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian. The Japanese people probably do have some genetic links to the peoples of China and Southeast Asia but their language is not related to any of them.

Chinese is definitely related to Tibetan. There is some evidence that it may be distantly related to Basque and Etruscan (extinct) in Europe, and to the Northern Caucasian group of languages (Abkhazian, Chechen, Circassian, Ingush etc.) in southern Russia. There is better evidence that it is distantly related to the Athabaskan Indian languages of Western Canada and the U.S. as shown by the linguist, Edward Sapir in the 1920's.

Answer 2

Japanese is basically a very mangled and evolved Chinese language. Every Japanese character evolved from Chinese character. The sentence structure is exactly the same as Chinese. In fact, a Chinese Hokkien speaker will be able to recognise many similar sounding Japanese words.

Korean is a mongolian language with entirely different sentence structure. It has some influences from Chinese and Japanese culture because of the geographic proximity. Completely different. Each character is made up of circles and straight lines and squares. Each of these circles, lines and squares represent a syllabus.

Vietnamese is quite similar to French. It evolved actually from an archaic form of Chinese dialect, Cantonese and then when French colonized Vietnam, the two languages merged to become what it is today.

Note that all these languages evolved or gained influence from the Chinese language in one way or another. China is extremely huge and the dialects and tongues can vary greatly in the country itself. In the past, only nobles or royals can speak and write the Chinese language.

Answer 3

Actually most pro's in the field of language origin along with scientist believe that spoken japanese evolved independently from asia until the modern world. chinese is definitely sino-tibetan, korean most likely is as well being along the boarder of china.

However japanese did not evolve from chinese at all as far as specialist can tell. It is true that the japanese written language did evolve from chinese written language but only because the japanese adopted the chinese language before they adopted the chinese written language the japanese had no written language, but spoken japanese did not come from chinese at all in any way.

In fact history and language experts have found that spoken japanese is actually unlike any language in the world which leads them to believe that the japanese spoken language evolved isolated from the rest of the world until the modern age.

So in conclusion the japanese did adopt the chinese written language because they needed a written language before that knowledge was passed through words alone. However the japanese spoken language is widely believe by actual experts respected in the field internationally to be a completely isolated language, meaning that it is completely unrelated to any language in the world.

Answer 4

hi, In what way do you think of that jap are appearing like Europeans ? And in what way are the Koreans appearing American ? i'm a ecu myself, and from my very own journey and remark, i think of that, Koreans are desperately attempting to act like jap. As for the jap, the sole different usa i will think of of, that act further would be Britain. the two jap and British human beings proportion a large number of stubbornness, national satisfaction, and whether British persons are plenty greater open and on the spot to alter, the two hate and can't settle for any criticisms. desire that facilitates.

Answer 5

really? according to my parents, they all originated from Chinese. That's why people in Korea still learn Chinese and that's why Japan still uses some Chinese characters. For Vietnamese, it may be different though, maybe it's written with our alphabet letters because France took over.....