2014-11-17 9:08 GMT-02:00 Magnus Bodin ☀ <[email protected]>: > Just to clarify. The transcribed form "ji" in the japanese emoji word > 絵文字 is probably not from mandarin, since 字 is pronounced "zi" in mandarin. > Is it pronounced "ji" in an other chinese language? >
Japanese doesn't usually borrow from Mandarin. Rather, a large amount of its vocabulary (about 60%) was borrowed from classical and medieval Chinese (much like the way that 58% of English words were borrowed from Latin and French). These words of Chinese origin are called *kango* in Japanese, and *ji *is one of them – quite naturally, as the concept of “written character” itself was acquired from China. There are three main layers of Chinese loans into Japanese: a stratum they call *go-on*, which came from Late Old Chinese and Early Middle Chinese (with a Korean flavor); the *kan-on* stratum *, *from the Chang'an dialect of Late Middle Chinese; and a bit of Song/Yuan Late Middle Chinese as *tōsō-on* [1]. The Japanese word *ji *“character” is from *go-on* Chinese, likely developing from Old Chinese *tsəʔ/*dzəh [2] or *dzə [3]. 字 may also be pronounced *shi*, which is from the *kan-on* layer. Notice that the Mandarin sound written as ‹z› (in 字 *zì *) doesn’t denote the [z] consonant but rather [ts] (Mandarin has no voiced consonants like [z] or [d]); and also that the Jap. ‹j› isn't English ‹j› but the same phoneme as a voiced /ti/ → /di/ → [(d)ʑi]. But this similarity isn't because Japanese borrowed from Mandarin; rather, they're cousins to the same ancestor. [1] Miyake, *Old Japanese: A Phonetic Reconstruction*. [2] Schuessler, *ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese*. [3] Baxter-Sagart Old Chinese reconstruction.
_______________________________________________ Unicode mailing list [email protected] http://unicode.org/mailman/listinfo/unicode
