Finnish and Japanese

[Mark I.]

Can you proove that? Japanese isn't even Altaic language.

True, nor is Finnish. I meant to say Japonic-Uralic or something like that. The first post of this topic messed my thoughts. My bad.

Everyone knows that finns genetically are germanic/slavonic/ugric. In that order. Just because our language isn't germanic or slavonic, it doesn't mean the people aren't.

Did I state otherwise? As it looks to me, you are just rephrasing what I already said. My point was that us Finns are genetically very European, but the Sami and Samoyeds (who I consider the more "rightful bearers" of Uralic languages thanks to their genetics) are not THAT Germanic or Slavic. Genetic studies are going back and forth with the origins of Sami, as some say Asian and some say European.

Perhaps I should have kept my mouth (err, fingers?) shut about genetics, as they are not the point of this topic at all. I just wanted to point out what I think about the origins of Uralic people, as people like Kalevi Wiik want to think it this way:
"Yeah, we are West Germanic and just came up with this sort of language during the ice age. The Samoyeds are just some chinks that adapted our language. And BTW, I base this on absolutely nothing."
The big difference between myself and him is that I do not make an ass out of myself in scientific circles (this forum does NOT count) if I do not have solid proof.


The main point of this topic, however, still remains. Japanese has been suggested to be a relative of so many languages (including English ) that I think it is fair to say the Finno-Ugric connection has been dramatically overlooked. To make this post worth of something, have a look at a pretty big list of similar words in Japanese and Hungarian, which does not exactly prove anything, but provides more material to study on. Add this to the structural and phonetic similarities of Japanese and Finnish/Estonian, and we have a pretty clear connection.

I am by no means saying my theory is complete. It is merely a reasonable hypothesis, which I hope to develop into a more scientific form. Steal my life's work and I will beat you to death with a fish.

What "slavonic"? Do you think Baltic means Slavic or something?

I think you'v got Wiik's hypothesis *exactly the wrong way around*. He suggests that originally people in "ukrane refugee place" during ice-age spoke some proto-Finnic (Germanics in Balkan's refugee, and Basks in Iberian refugee), and after ice-age spreaded around middle- and eastern Europe. Then later gemanic farmer people spreaded their influence northwards (which was occupied by "Finnics"), and those Finnic tribes changed their language to germanic ones (and at the same time influenced languages so, that it (in part) resulted different languages like German, Flamish etc.).

IMO trying to prove Japanese to be somehow connected to FU languages is really crazy, compaired to Wiik's hypothesis.

[Kompostiturska]

I didn't say Slavonic first, Matula did. Blame him and my fragile little mind prone to influences. Slavonic in this case probably means Russian (ask Matula).

Damn, I'm shocked. I remembered Wiik's theory very wrong. Perhaps I should learn to re-check things out first . It has been ages since I read the whole thing, so forgive me. Yet the main thing to critisize still remains: he takes the Samoyeds as some worthless side notice and claims they are just an Asian tribe who adapted a language from Europeans. I personally find it a lot easier to believe contrariwise.

On a side notice, I am not in a minority when it comes to critisizing his work. Although I remembered it incorrectly, it still remains pretty foolish to me. Thoroughbred Middle European Cro-Magnons with some Mongolic characteristics, anyone?

You certainly have your rights to your opinions, but I don't think it would be the longest geographical distance between language relatives. The distance from Samoyedic areas (hypothetically including Yugaghirs) to Japan isn't exactly that long, if thinking about the distance between English and Hindi speakers, for example

[Mark I.]

Are you and Matula youngsters? Like 15?

[Matula]

Are you and Matula youngsters? Like 15?

I'm not. Slavonic means Russians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks,... etc. I always thought that was common knowledge.

[Mark I.]

Show me one, I repeat, *one* reference to appropiate research, confirming your "common knowlege".

[Kompostiturska]

Are you and Matula youngsters? Like 15?

Sure, I'm young and uneducated, yet I like to suggest various possibilities. I think that was the entire point of the topic. Sure, my "findings" are more likely just fantasia BS, but there is that slight possibility of being right I like to cling to. You can disagree and laugh all you want, but you can't prove me wrong, now can you?

All this genetic babbling has been my attempt to give an explanation to the *likely* possibility of a connection Finnish and Japanese. I am by no means saying that I am telling the truth here, especially when it comes to Finnish origins and such. Now IF we assume Finnish and Japanese are relative languages, wouldn't it be more likely that Uralic languages are of Asian origin? Unless, of course, you suggest Japs fell from the sky.

[Coren]

I just noticed one quite interesting thing.

English: One
Finnish: Yksi
Japanese: Ichi

Yksi and ichi both sound very similar. The origin of the word 'yksi' has, as far as I know, been unknown. Possible connection?

There's also this one

English: No
Finnish: Ei
Japanese: Iie

Again, even though written very differently, the words sound quite similar.


These may of course be just coinsidences, but on the other hand they may also point at a common language ancestor.

But one thing is for sure. It's always fun inventing theories.

[sammy]

English: No
Finnish: Ei
Japanese: Iie

Admitted... we Finns are just a bunch of backward Japanese

Check out this: http://www.zompist.com/chance.htm (I can't comment on the finer details of the presented statistics, but the basic idea seems okay to me)

Also have a look at the points of view presented here:

http://homepage.univie.ac.at/johanna.la ... fufaq.html

How can you know that some languages are related?
Languages are genetically related if their common characteristics - words, affixes, features - can be explained as inheritance from a common proto-language.

Finding such common characteristics is not easy. We must take into account

random similarities. Since the sound systems of the world's languages use a relatively small number of sounds (usually some thirty) put together on fairly universal principles, it is statistically quite probable that different languages have quite similar words - especially if these languages have a similar sound system and if these words are descriptive by nature.
typological connections. The Turkic languages have many structural features similar to e.g. Finnish, like the vowel harmony and a suffixing morphology (endings attached to the end of the word). However, this only shows that certain features often coincide: Turkic and FU languages (like some other languages of the world) just happen to belong to the agglutinative type.
later influences. Similar-sounding words are not necessarily common inheritance: e.g. vunukka ’grandchild’ (in some Eastern Finnish dialects) is not originally related to Hungarian unoka, but both are loans from Slavic languages.
sound developments. In hundreds and thousands of years, words and sounds may change drastically: would you notice that Sanskrit chakra is related to English wheel, or Finnish ydin ’marrow’ to Hungarian velõ? Or would you know that Hungarian fiú ’boy’ and ház ’house’ are not related to Romanian fiu and German Haus but to e.g. Finnish poika and kota, respectively? (More Indo-European examples: does a hippo have feathers?)
You can't prove genetic relatedness by merely finding similarities in dictionaries and word lists. Instead, you should find systematic correspondences, reconstruct common proto-forms, explain the developments leading from them and make all this coherent with what is known of the history of the languages in question and languages in general. Besides, similar words are not enough, because words change and are replaced: you should find correspondences in grammar and affixes, too.

[janbrewer]

Hi,
if you're looking for more similarities between Japanese and Finnish, plenty can be found. For instance, to my home = talooNI, Japanese: UchiNI. Also, poetic Finnish can be written SOV and not the ususal SVO. Japanese is SOV.
example: Uchini ikimasu = talooni menen = to my house I go.

However, I agree with the point of view that much can be coincidence: for instance, check out this similarity with the Italian language:
the second person plural always ends in TE.

te menetTE = you (plural) go = voi andaTE

first person plural ends in ME in Finnish, IAMO in Italian

me meneMME = andIAMO

and the third person ends in A or E for both languages.

proto - Italian - Finnish connection anyone?

Japanese, by the way, has no verb conjunctions depending on the subject of the sentence.


a couple more, for fun: donkey = AASI= Asino
and however = kumminkin = comunque
I used to know more, when living in Italy but they have now slipped my mind.


[/b]

[janbrewer]

oops, forgot one more: in Japanese, the ending -YA signifies "a place of" in suffix form, rather than prefix; in Finnish, the old equivalent is -LA.

eg. SakanaYA = fishmonger; c.f. finnish karjaLA or some others... getting a little rusty... memory failing

[enk]

example: Uchini ikimasu = talooni menen = to my house I go.

All good and well, except for -ni in Japanese and -ni in Finnish do
not mean the same thing at all. -ni in Japanese is a location particle
and -ni in Finnish is a possessive suffix.

-enk

[janbrewer]

Oh yep... thanks for pointing that out. Perhaps I meant to say, the finnish equivalent is -n as in "menen kotiiN" or "kauppaaN" or "kouluuN" which is still similar enough to warrant comparison.

another, off the top of my head: "Juoppo" means drunkard in Finnish, "jopparai" is drunk in Nihongo.

oh, and I meant to say "verb conjugations," not conjunctions. I was belabouring under an extreme state of sleep deprivation when i wrote those messages - and it shows

[janbrewer]

Anyway, a few more thoughts: It seems silly to dismiss these claims to a linguistic connection: after all, the Japanese and archaic Finnish words for Sauna are exactly identical: "mokomaki hikitupa." Check it out, if you didn't know.

And as i understood it, (sources not forthcoming, sorry) Korean is Altaic, the same ancient branch as Finnish, is it not? Since Japanese came from Korean, with little doubt (despite all manner of politically sensitive histrionics thrown to claim the contrary) I think the claims of a connection cannot be dismissed as spurious. Language need not have any correlation with genetics; if a small tribe say of Uralic peoples settle on the Estonian coast, and live there for a while, farming and hunting away, and a steady stream of wandering germanic (indo-european, if you like) comes joining the clan and contributing their genetic matter while deferring to the language of the tribe as they must if fewer in number, eventually, due to a popularity or other selective advantage of those genes in the population, or simply the constant addition from outside, they will come to be the dominant genotype, while the language will be far closer to the original tribe's language. this could explain the asiatic origins of the Finnish language and their part-European genetics. Another hypothesis is that since the language is so damned complicated, it added an evolutionary benefit to have to speak it - greater intelligence - and so it was retained stubbornly through the years, despite the change in the population through outsiders. This would explain Nokia and the success in the Talvi and Jatkosodat, among other things LOL!!

[Kompostiturska]

Korean is Altaic, the same ancient branch as Finnish, is it not?

Korean: possibly Altaic; not a widely accepted theory
Finnish: less possibly Altaic (though Ural-Altaic is a popular theory)

So, no.

Japanese came from Korean

Proposed yet never accepted. The main problem of this theory is that the further one goes back in time, the less Korean and Japanese resemble each other.

Japanese, by the way, has no verb conjunctions depending on the subject of the sentence.

This could explained by the fact that Japanese was written in Chinese characters for a long time. Giving an agglutinative language a writing system designed for an analytic one may result in heavy simplicity. Imagine that you have the symbols for "fish" and "to be", and you are not allowed to create symbols for synthetic features, such as conjunctions (because no-one else would understand them!). Now, you want to write "I am a fish", which could be something along the lines of "sakana desun" in an imaginary language called Finnish-ish Old Japanese. Input symbols 1 and 2, and you'll have "fish be" -> "sakana desu". You'll just have to guess the exact meaning from the context.

Of course it sounds a bit awkward that a writing system would change the way a language is spoken, but it kind of makes sense to me this way. Any thoughts (besides "you're an idiot")?

[enk]

Japanese, by the way, has no verb conjunctions depending on the subject of the sentence.

Neither does Swedish:

jag vet
du vet
han/hon vet
vi vet
ni vet
de vet

Is it related then? Granted Swedish did use to have a plural form in
addition to the singular form.

Verbs do conjugate in Japanese, not for person, but for tense, mood, etc.;
more information on that can be found on Wikipedia, for instance.

As for conjunctions, Finnish did not have any of its own before it borrowed
or derived them, just like the rest of the F-U languages.

-enk