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Birds of East Asia & Mainland Southeast Asia Glossary of Species Names in Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese |
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Birds of East Asia & Mainland Southeast Asia Glossary of Species Names in Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese |
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Orthography has played a fascinating role in creating similarities and differences in the three languages' systems of bird names. The fact that Japanese uses Chinese characters while Vietnamese does not has had an important influence.
In the case of Japanese, the use of Chinese characters has facilitated broad-ranging interchange with Chinese, despite the fact that, etymologically speaking, the Chinese and Japanese words are largely unrelated.
In Vietnamese, on the other hand, the deep-rooted Chinese influence of several millennia was nullified when the Chinese writing system was jettisoned in the early 20th century. By adopting a romanised script, the Vietnamese declared cultural and linguistic independence, obscuring many lexical similarities with Chinese and freeing Vietnamese from adherence to the Chinese model.
To take an example, a Chinese speaker who looks at the Japanese names of the Accipitrinae in Chinese characters (not katakana) will see enough to convince him or her that Japanese is quite close to Chinese. On the other hand, a glance at Vietnamese will leave the impression that the two languages are quite unrelated.
Paradoxically, both observations would be totally incorrect: none of the Japanese names for birds in Accipitrinae is remotely related to Chinese, whereas three of the five main words in Vietnamese have their roots in Chinese. The reasons for this paradox are directly and indirectly related to the orthography.
1. Chinese characters facilitate cross-recognition. In Japanese, Chinese characters are used to write not only words borrowed from Chinese but also native Japanese words. Thus, the character 鹰, read yīng in Chinese and meaning 'hawk', is used in Japanese to write the purely native word taka. To the Chinese speaker, it looks as though the Japanese and Chinese word are the same. In fact, taka is not a Chinese word at all.
Japanese speakers feel a huge affinity with Chinese because of the use of Chinese characters. Any Chinese word can, in principle, be borrowed into Japanese using the on reading (a systems of readings that reflects the original Chinese pronunciation). All Chinese characters, except some that were 'made in Japan', have on readings.
To reinforce the illusion, Japanese was formerly in the habit of taking entire Chinese words (not just single characters) and using them to represent etymologically unrelated Japanese words with the same or similar meaning. The effect of this was to provide a kind of gloss on the meaning of the Japanese word. Although this kind of usage is no longer common in Japanese it is still shown in dictionaries.
In the case of Vietnamese, the etymological connection with Chinese is disguised by the Latin alphabet, especially for those who are accustomed to seeing Chinese words in the form of characters (99% of Chinese speakers). Thus, a Chinese speaker would totally miss any cognate words in Vietnamese.
2. Chinese characters form a channel for mutual linguistic influence. The system of Vietnamese bird names is totally different from both the Chinese and Japanese names. While it may be far-fetched to claim that this is a result of discarding the Chinese writing system, it must be seen as a background cause. By ditching Chinese characters, the Vietnamese basically lost whatever obligation they may have felt to refer to Chinese precedents in choosing and developing bird names. Vietnamese ornithologists were free to develop bird names completely on their own terms. The system of common bird names that the Vietnamese have adopted owes nothing to the Chinese model (or even, for that matter, the English model).
On the other hand, the shared use of Chinese characters facilitated ornithological interchange between China and Japan over a long period of time before WWII, an interchange that still continues in Taiwan. This means that many names have developed in parallel in the two languages and the distribution of names is, in many cases, broadly similar.
