Friendship 2.0: Ben - March 18th - Learn Chinese!

[antonoir85]

Once again, an awesome video!

Ive noticed there is a big similarity between Japanese and Chinese numbers. Like number 3 is exactly the same in both languages.

[worldwideawesome]

Yeah, it's actually quite fascinating to compare the two languages. The "ichi ni san" that you might have learned is actually borrowed from the Chinese, and is more or less how the Chinese would have pronounced 12 3 during the Tang dynasty. Back then the Japanese had borrow the writing system and copious ammounts of vocabulary from them, but the process was reversed a thousand years later, during the Meiji Restoration when the Chinese had to borrow the industrialized Japanese words for ...

[worldwideawesome]

... things like "telephone", "railroad", "constitution", etc.

There was actually another completely native Japanese counting system and it still comes through sometimes in modern Japanese, "hitotsu, futatsu, mittsu..."

You can see though that for counting things its a lot easier to do it in Chinese due to it being monosyllabic in nature, and I think that's why "ichi ni san" is a lot more common.

-Ben

[LordBLT]

Number 9 number 9 number 9 number 9