At 3:56:44 PM on Thursday, February 7, 2008, Rick
McCallister wrote:
> Read a history of the Japanese language. Japanese
> professors have told me the majority of Japanese words
> are "Sino-Japanese." I've read that roughly half or
> more of Japanese vocabulary is from Chinese. No, I'm
> not an expert on Japanese and I'm just repeating what
> I've heard and read. I'm sure someone like Sasha Vovin
> could tell you the exact number.
According to Masayoshi Shibatani, 'Japanese', in _The
World's Major Languages_, Bernard Comrie, ed.:
Japanese has borrowed words from neighbouring languages
such as Ainu and Korean, but by far the most numerous are
Chinese loanwords. Traditionally, the Japanese lexicon is
characterised in terms of three strata. The terms _wago_
'Japanese words' or _Yamato-kotoba_ 'Yamato (Japanese)
words' refer to the stratum of the native vocabulary and
_kango_ 'Chinese words' refers to loanwords of Chinese
origin (hereafter called Sino-Japanese words). All other
loanwords from European languages are designated by the
term _gairaigo_ 'foreign words' (lit. 'foreign coming
words'). The relative proportions of these loanwords in
the _Genkai_ dictionary (1859) were: Sino-Japanese words
-- 60%, foreign words -- 1.4 percent, the rest being
native words. Although the proportion of foreign words
has been steadily increasing (see below), that of the
Sino-Japanese words remains fairly constant.
[...]
The proportion and the status of the Sino-Japanese words
in Japanese are strikingly similar to those of the
Latinate words in English. The proportion of Latinate
words in English vocabulary is estimated to be around 55
per cent, while that of Germanic (Anglo-Saxon) words and
of other foreign loans are 35 per cent and 10 per cent,
respectively. Furthermore, the status of the
Sino-Japanese words in Japanese is quite similar to that
of Latinate words in English. As they tend to express
abstract concepts, Sino-Japanese words make up the great
majority of learned vocabulary items.
Brian