Because the Bantu languages (most prominently: Swahili) and Japanese have similar sound systems. Finnish is also oddly similar-sounding, or Hawaiian. None of them are actually related.
It's because the syllable is restricted in the number of possible forms, in a similar way. (And they all have approximately five vowels. And a pitch accent.) In Hawaiian, nothing but consonant + vowel syllables are possible. Swahili and Japanese allow an optional final n sound. Finnish is a little more flexible, and syllables can end with an n, r, l or t. No consonant clusters, in any of the languages. No syllables ending with consonants outside the restricted set (if any), in any of the languages.
This results in a lot of syllables of the form: i, a, ne, na, ka, ta, po, to... "Pokatokaino". I just made that up and it's probably not a Swahili, Finnish, Hawaiian, or Japanese word -- but it could be.
This basic pattern (consonant + vowel + maybe limited option for final consonant) is very common; it's the most common arrangement among the worlds languages. Far more common than languages like English which allow monstrosities like "strengths" (which is 6 consonants and one vowel).
Nit: pokatokaino is unlikely to be Japanese, since word-initial p has morphed into h during the centuries. But it works if you turn it into, say, t.
Anyway, I think there's another factor: the common alphabet we transliterate these languages to is quite limited. I suspect the similarities become less obvious if you use something like the IPA, which has better universal correspondence between sounds and letters (i.e. doesn't reduce every sound to the same ~26 symbols).
There are also many native Japanese onomatopoeiae using an initial p sound. Interestingly enough, if we're at Pokémon, Pikachu's name is influenced by the onomatopoeia /pikapika/ which means to shine, sparkle or flash. But if we look at the original pronounciation of the Japanese verb 光る/hikaru ("to shine"), it would have been pronounced /pikaru/ in Old Japanese, so it looks like the onomatopoeia has re-established itself.
The same is probably true for the Japanese word for flag, 旗/hata - it would have been pronounced /pata/ which is suspiciously reminiscent of the onomatopoeia /patapata/, often used for thin pieces of material flapping in the wind.
The pika is an obscure (yet barely interesting...) rabbit thing with no cultural salience, whose most noted features are its alarm call and lack of visible tail, nor are its names pronounced much like the pika in Pikachu in the languages Japanese has much exchange with. Pikachu is explicitly a rodent (a "mouse" with some squirrel inspirations) designed in the early 90s with none of those features.
To be fair, Pokémon is abbreviated English, while pachinko is recent from pachin, the onomatopoeia of the loud sound made by the metal balls.
I believe the change into “h” sounds is more applied to words that were traditionally initiated in “p” but morphed over time, in turn also making words starting on “p” an oddity.
This is an interesting phenomenon in language change. There is the question of what sounds are legal in the language (or what sound combinations, and in what contexts), and there's the separate question of which of those possibilities actually exist. For example, syllable-initial "th" is never followed by L in English, but the sound sequence generally doesn't pose difficulties to English speakers, who are already familiar with words like e.g. "three", "shrink", and "sleep".
For a sound to occur in a language, there are two requirements:
The obvious one is that it has to be possible.
But the less-obvious one is that its precursor in the ancestral language must have been possible there. This is what causes strange gaps where it looks like a sound should be possible, and yet it never occurs.
Fair; though I didn't say it's impossible, just unlikely :)
Japanese words starting with "p" still exist, but they tend to be loanwords
(pokemon = pocket + monster) or onomatopoeia (pachinko = pachin + ko).
Thinking of it now, pokapoka is also a word, but again, an onomatopoeia.
There are other subtle rules that language may follow in word formation.
For example, in Japanese, a word like tokatokaino may mutate into tokadokaino due to a phonological effect called Rendaku (it depends on details like if "tokadokaino" is a compound word made of "toka"+"toka"+"ino")
So Toyota has a company folklore explanation to do with the number of strokes when written in hiragana being a lucky number, but Japanese linguists were skeptical when the BBC did a piece on it and think it was just a preference for the unvoiced version when the town in which it was founded changed its name to match the company: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8534294.stm
That's a good point. Latin letters map to a big number of IPA sounds.
I think this is specially true with consonants. Vowels, however, might be the same. For example, Spanish has five vowels (a, e, i, o, u in IPA). Japanese also has five IPA vowels and only the "u" is different in IPA
As a speaker of Scandinavian languages, literally none of the vowels in English map correctly to how we pronounce the same vowels. Several of the English vowels are diphthongs, which we spell out with double vowels. Like eng. "i" is our "ai", eng. "a" is our "ei" - "a bridge" is translated to "ei bro", where the articles are pronounced exactly the same. Or the Scottish word for home, "hame", is pronounced exactly like we say the same word, "heim".
When learning German it was a revelation that languages could pronounce the same letters in the same way in every word, and therefore you could accurately predict the pronunciation of a word from the spelling.
English does not do this; every word has its own pronunciation, only loosely related to how it is spelled. I think every native English speaker has had the experience of learning a word from reading it, and subsequently mis-pronouncing it because we had to guess at the pronunciation. E.g. I suffered acute embarrassment from mis-pronouncing "Hermione" when talking to a friend about the Potter books. I grew up in the UK but had never met the name before and my guess at pronunciation was entirely reasonable but entirely wrong.
Though I lived for a while in Ireland, and they have it worse. My friend Mebd laughed at me a lot.
Yes, this is also part of the reason why spelling bees are a uniquely American thing - in most other languages it is trivial to predict pronounciation from spelling, so a competition makes no sense.
To add to the confusion, in English people might pronounce the article "a" as "ei" (like when reciting "ABC") or "uh" (like the start of "under"). I think most Americans do the latter. I do, at least.
I'm a native Greek speaker and to my ears all European languages' vowels are weird with the exception of Spanish, which is completely normal. All those airy sounds: caaat dooog, haaaaouse, taaaaime, etc like a little fish trying to eat a much bigger fish. Let me not start with French, or Italian. Conversely, when I hear myself or another Greek speaker speak English it's like there's a little guillotine in the back of the neck that snaps shut just when a vowel is starting to form: c't, d'g, ta'm, etc.
That's the difference between [e] and [ɛ] in IPA (in IPA, with "narrow" phonetic transcription, you enclose the sounds in brackets). In American English, "ace" is [eɪs] and "mess" is [mɛs]. But I don't think that's right; I'm pretty sure both the Japanese e and Spanish e sound exactly the same.
And if you pronounced [e] and [ɛ] to native speakers of either Spanish or Japanese, they most likely wouldn't be able to differentiate the two sounds consistently without having had training. I know that in Spanish, realization of e can be either vowel depending on the speaker and context; they might pronounce "tierra" as [tjɛra] and "mesa" as [mesa].
> And if you pronounced [e] and [ɛ] to native speakers of either Spanish or Japanese, they most likely wouldn't be able to differentiate the two sounds consistently without having had training.
I am a Spanish guy living in Japan, so I can confirm it. I didn't have any idea that the two sounds are supposed to be different because to me they sound exactly the same.
Fun fact: Japanese people are surprised that we have the same five vowels (although the U is a bit different), and that we can get the correct pronunciation very easily.
>they most likely wouldn't be able to differentiate the two sounds consistently without having had training
I learn English since I was pretty young, I believe I'm quite fluent (I mostly use English for work, I lived for two years in an English speaking country, I read books in English, etc), and I still have problems distinguishing some English vowels. I think sound acquisition is one of the hardest things to learn for a non-native speaker.
Japanese e would only ever be [ɛ]. The constructs to produce an [e] sound would be transliterated as "ei" (the quoted are just letters, not meant to be IPA).
So, while I disagree that they sound "exactly the same", I do agree that in most cases the differences between [e] and [ɛ] wouldn't be enough to cause confusion between speakers of either language.
What's your source for this?
Wikipedia says "/e, o/ are mid [e̞, o̞]" [1]
>The mid front unrounded vowel is a type of vowel sound that is used in some spoken languages. There is no dedicated symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents the exact mid front unrounded vowel between close-mid [e] and open-mid [ɛ], but it is normally written ⟨e⟩.
The "n" sound denoting negative seems deeply ingrained in English (and also in this native English speaker). So Finnish "niin" for affirmative took a very long time to get used to, and to actually begin using. It just felt wrong.
It goes even deeper than just English. No descends from the Indo-European negation phoneme *ne. You see similar 'n' sound negative words in pretty much every IE language group.
Speaking of similar sound system of Finnish and Japenese, I think we should highlight the discredited language family claim of Uralic-Altaic, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ural-Altaic_languages
You can still find tons of other theories of "what else could be related to Uralic"...
So far, no African languages were included in these theories. But that's probably just a question of time and politics (and definitely not linguistic research...)
>the discredited language family claim of Uralic-Altaic
I'd substitute "doubtful" for "discredited".
The article you link says nothing more damning than "It is now generally agreed [wrt Ural-Altaic] that even the Altaic languages [themselves] do not share a common descent: the similarities between Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic are better explained by diffusion and borrowing", but that wiki comment is a paraphrasal of a source that says "a pattern [that] is easily explainable by borrowing and diffusion rather than common descent", i.e. not "better", just weakening that alternate claim.
Also, the Altaic article says that there is still a small group of scholars who adhere to an "Altaic" grouping.
And I would add, the lack of existence of an "Altaic" common ancestor to Mongolic, Turkic, Tungusic, and Koreanic says nothing about potential connections between Uralic and any of those 4 independent languages.
I'm not expert enough to advocate any position, but I'm interested and it's irritating when I pursue researching my interest to discover people slightly misquoting others or ignoring additional possiblities to make their own pov stronger.
> This basic pattern (consonant + vowel + maybe limited option for final consonant) is very common; it's the most common arrangement among the worlds languages. Far more common than languages like English which allow monstrosities like "strengths" (which is 6 consonants and one vowel).
It's a fun spectrum!
Italian is often given as an example of this, but Italian does allow more complex consonant clusters at the beginning of a syllable than Hawaiian or Japanese (e.g. gra-do, glo-bo, pneu-ma-ti-co). You see echoes of the Italian proclivity towards final vowels in English-language stereotypes of Italian accents, where a schwa (an 'uh' sound) is added after word final consonants ("I want-uh" etc.).
Czech, on the other end of the spectrum, happily allows for things like zmrz-li-na and - famously - strč prst skrz krk (yes, that spelling is phonetic - the rs are syllabic). Interestingly though, Czech evolved out of late Proto-Slavic, and PS had a rule that no syllable end with a consonant (the law of open syllables). This made late Proto-Slavic look more like modern Italian. So, e.g. prst in Czech was prĭ-stŭ in Old Church Slavonic, and krk was krŭ-kŭ.
Your general gist is correct: languages with CV (consonant-vowel) phonotactics[1] with a simple vowel systems tend to develop similar features, possibly through convergent evolution:
- agglutinative syntax (i.e. combining long sequences of words and suffixes to form complex meanings)
- vowel harmony (seems to exist in the earliest attested forms of Old Japanese, but not anymore)
- palatalization before front vowels (i, e)
- further simplification of the vowel system
My only nitpick is that Bantu languages are not relevant here. The author is explicitly focusing on Nigerian languages (although he titled that "Japanese words and name sound African"... Africa is a big continent with just as much language diversity as Asia, if not more). While there are some Bantu languages in Nigeria, they aren't as prominent there as they are in East, Central and South Africa. The author mentions Yoruba, Igbo, Fula, Hausa, Edo and several others - none of them is a Bantu language, although some are related. Even though you can put all of the languages above (except for Hausa) into the hypothetical Niger-Congo macro-family, together with the Bantu languages, they are quite far away by this point.
The other issue is that Bantu languages are probably not the best example for "Japanese-sounding" languages. They feature very frequent use of prenasalized consonants. While prenasalization almost certainly existed in Old Japanese[2] and is still retained in some northeastern dialects, this is not something people would identify with "Japanese-sounding" nowadays. Not to mention southern Bantu languages like Zulu and Xhosa that feature heavy usage of click consonants - these are completely alien to Japanese phonology.
But this doesn't detract at all from your argument. Languages with similar structure, will often sound similar. I think the other anecdote the author mentions (Plateau State languages sounding Sino-Tiban) also checks out. I am not familiar with any of these languages, but it seems many of them are tonal and based around heavy use of complex monosyllabic morphemes with complex combinations of initial consonant + medial glides(?) + diphthongs + final consonants. This is exactly what so strongly distinguishes the phonology and phonotactics of Sino-Tibetan languages.
Pokatokaino is indeed not a Finnish word, but contains multiple:
Pokat - slang for sunglasses,
Kato - slang version of katso (look),
Toka - slang version of toinen (ordinal second),
Kaino - timid/coy.
Finnish has umlauts though, so quite a lot of words don’t sound like the mentioned languages so much.
Yep it's just the coincidence of a simple sound system and finding patterns where none exist. For example saying ba means horse in Japanese isn't exactly correct, horse is uma, ba is just the closest sound that exists which allows Japanese people to pronounce Chinese words like 馬力 circa whenever that word was added to the language, if they took it today it would be ma.
It's the equivalent of Latin or Greek words and affixes in English.
Regarding the similarities between Hawaiian and Japanese: There are theories among linguists that there is a connection between Austronesian languages and Japanese. These theories don’t seem to be infeasible, but are currently lacking sufficient supporting evidence.
From an English perspective katakana (a system for writing words foreign to Japan, which can't write English very well) seems broken, but I guess from what you say that it's probably effective for most languages
It may be "broken" in the sense that it's not accurate to the original language in orthography or pronunciation, but it's great because it's internally consistent for speakers of Japanese. I can look at any foreign word in katakana and instantly know how to pronounce it in a way that is intelligible to other people in the language I'm speaking: Japanese.
Even with the way English does it for other languages that use the same alphabet, while the orthography may be similar, the pronunciation is generally just left to luck and the speaker's/listener's perception of the word's original language.
Gyang Nyam definitely sounds Korean (thanks to that old meme), but then Shom Pwajok is less discernable -- it's like a hint of Thai or some other southeast Asian language.
While they could be valid Korean syllables, they don't sound like Korean names, either. The only words containing "gyang" or "nyam" I can think of are slangs or onomatopoeia, and I don't think I've seen "shom" or "pwa" in the wild.
> Shok Jok. That name could pass for a Mandarin or Cantonese name.
These sounds do not exist in Mandarin. This would never be, or sound like, a Mandarin name. And no mention is made of tones, which are critical in Mandarin.
The article already smelled of a bovid's feces, but at this point I actually saw the bullshit.
These sounds sounds more like a Southern Chinese language, not Mandarin. Mandarin has highly simplified set of finals (essentially /n/, /ng/ and /r/) which cannot even combine freely with most vowels. But Southern Chinese languages preserve a more complex final system.
I still don't think "Shok Jok" sounds very much Chinese (It mostly sounds American English[1] to me), but YMMV.
Then there are real coincidences, like 'Muratori', which is both an Italian name [1] (Casey Muratori) and a real (though somewhat rare) Japanese name. [2]
TIL. Just assumed it's more likely a "cool" pseudonym, considering a common fascination with everything Japanese in the nerd circles, than a diverse heritage. Turns out it's neither.
btw, there was once a consular official who worked at the Japanese embassy in Kenya, whose name was Mr. Kuma Moto. Every time he was introduced, it was hard for folks to suppress their laughter as the name literally meant "hot vagina" (in Kiswahili the noun goes first)
I guess Kumamoto prefecture is popular with Kenyan tourists then?
I guess it'd be like if there was someone who worked at the Russian embassy in Japanese and was named Mankovich because it would be rendered as マンコビッチ pussy bitch.
>His lexicostatistical analysis found that less than 30 percent of the similar-sounding words between Plateau State languages and China’s Sino-Tibetan languages share similar meanings. Linguists call these kinds of similarities "accidental evidence."
Ok, but that's still a very high percentage. Shouldn't that be surprising?
Given how many language families there are in Africa and how wide the sound gamut is between them I bet there's a close phonetic counterpart to any language somewhere in Africa.
> Finnish is a little more flexible, and syllables can end with an n, r, l or t. No consonant clusters, in any of the languages. No syllables ending with consonants outside the restricted set (if any)
What do you mean? There are words like Ahti (Ah), ankerias (as), isku (is) or lapsi (lap) which contain syllables that end in consonants other than n, r, l or t. There are also a lot of words with double consonants (like jarru, lasso, noppa, nurkka) where syllable get split at the middle.
In Hebrew too, most famously Ishimoto sounds like Ish (guy) 'im (with) Otto (car) so is considered a good name for a driver. I'll leave you to figure out why Sakimkaki is a good word for "diaper", and yes, I know that can't be japanese because of the m, but most Hebrew speakers don't.
It's trying to make the claim that these are etymological connections, which is a bit sketchy, but the phonological similarities it has meticulously catalogued are surprisingly convincing!
There are a lot of obvious cognates between Japanese and Latin through recently borrowed English or Romance words, so I was wondering what was surprising about it.
But it seems the author is talking about traditional Japanese words, and looking for ties in words and idioms like ("kokoro" & "corculum"), ("koi" & "cupio"), ("ganbare" & "quam vale"), ("omedetō" & "omen datum").
Yes interesting elephant in Japanese is almost the same word in Shona (a bantu language of Zimbabwe) nzou vs zou and sound very similar. Many words have similar structures. Many shona names could be mistaken to be Japanese.
JP Hash: hashes strings into an output consisting of easy-to-type/remember Japanese syllables, ensuring there is an upper case letter, symbol and digit.
Yoruba is a tonal language like Japanese. There are a lot of similarities and Japanese isn’t nearly as alien to Yoruba speakers as it is to English speakers.
All humans share same vocal cords, breathing and tongue and mouth shape. For there you can derive some amount of sounds that travel reasonably well in air.
I would expect most of these sounds to follow similar rules. Sometimes there might be something like clicks, but in general similar sounds will be used. And certain styles will probably cluster as well.
In the end you have handful of options and thousands of languages. So some must end up being similar.
The article seems to say it's random chance, based upon one linguists opinion. Doesn't at all feel right statistically. Seems more likely there would be some kind of missing link.
Could someone better informed possibly figure out the odds?
Why not? Many unrelated languages steer towards the open syllable rule. It's basically the only similarity between Japanese and African languages. Open syllables without complex consonant clusters are easier to pronounce.
Say, Proto-Slavic phonetics mostly allowed only open syllables, although its ancestor and descendants allow more complex clusters. For example, Proto-Indoeuropean domos "house" became Proto-Slavic domu, and mater "mother" became mati.
Let's list some Proto-Slavic words: noga "foot", ronka "hand", nosu "nose", oko "eye", podushiwa "foot sole", noguti "nail" etc.
You can cherrypick many languages like that (Finnish, Maori, Basque, even French to some extent)
It would be much more surprising if they found 2 unrelated languages and they both had same complex clusters a la Georgian (mtsvrtneli "trainer").