Help me with Japanese hieroglyphs!

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Wraith
--"HUI pronounced with a high, level tone means ash, or dust."

I'd love to hear how that sounds, when pronounced. "hai", 灰 , is a word for ash in Japanese (but ash as in the color; gray, charcoal, etc).

If you pronounce "who" and "way" very quickly and together, you get a pretty close sound.

Originally posted by Wraith
It's a valid combination of syllables, but I've never seen it used. A quick search doesn't show it listed as a name, either.

Thanks.

Originally posted by Wraith
It doesn't really work that way, though. Logographs do not fit this assumption. Heck, even in various dialects of Chinese it doesn't work. Mandarin and Cantonese use, as I understand it, the exact same characters, but are spoken very differently.

Mandarin and Cantonese use the same characters written. More precisely, Cantonese preserves a more ancient form of Mandarin, which overlaps with the modern form to a large extent. Therefore, some characters have very different pronounciations, some others are pretty close. Also, as a result, the idea that some spoken characters in Cantonese that used to be thought of having no corresponding written forms turned out to be wrong. There are such characters, just that they aren't used in written Mandarin anymore.

Originally posted by Wraith
As I mentioned above, you do have to learn the Chinese meanings of the logographs when learning Kanji, so Japanese people can probably read a fair bit of Chinese (one of my coworkers is from Japan, and he can read at least parts of documents in Mandarin, which another of my coworkers speaks), but it won't work the other way around. They won't be able to speak it any, however, unless they've studied the language seperately.

Often, the same characters or short phrases carry different meanings in Japanese and Chinese. So I reckon your friend could read the characters, but probably cannot arrive at the correct meaning.

[Q Classic]

Korean and Japanese people, do you understand each other? The languages are from the same lingual group but have centures of evolution. As i noticed Ukrainians ofthen understand Bulgarian but not always and not everything.
How many foreighn words are in Korean language? Do you have own words for "democracy", "elecricity", "vodka", "helicopter"?

chinese is in its own language group, sino tibetan; korean and japanese are considered as related to each other, but some literature suggests there might be a link to a ural-altaic group; that view has recently fallen out of favor.
the writing systems originated in a strange way. the chinese came up with their logographs, and it spread to korea and japan.
japan eventually developed two syllabaries out of the characters, and named them hiragana and katakana. the former is used for changable parts of pure japanese words, as well as a few words which do not have kanji attached to them. they use katakana as a phonetic syllabary to transliterate foreign words and phrases. kanji is used for many nouns, verbs, and adjectives, and remains today as a large part of the written language. these systems of writing originated from between the 12th to 14th centuries.
korea developed its own alphabetic script. each symbol represents a single sound, divided into consonants and vowels. anywhere from two to four symbols (one or two have to be vowels) are combined to form one syllabic character. it is not derived from the chinese hanja (the korean term for chinese characters), and these days, literary korean uses few hanja. this system of writing originated in the 16th century.

korean and japanese have similar grammatical structures: case markings for nouns, subject-object-verb word order, counters for marking a number of items, and no articles.

there are similar words, but this is mostly because of loan words:

meaning	korean	japanese	origin
chinese characters (~written language of the hans)	hanja	kanji
chinese
promise	yaksok	yakusoku	unknown
school	hakkyo	dakkyo	chinese
college	taehakkyo	daigaku	chinese

days of the week are a special case. the korean and japanese names for them are derived from the original chinese names for the days; however, in modern chinese, the names have changed, while in korean and japanese, the names have remained the same. also, the hanja/kanji characters for the days are identical.

day	korean	japanese
sunday	il-yo-il	ni-chi-yo-bi
monday	wol-yo-il	get-su-yo-bi
tuesday	hwai-yo-il	ka-yo-bi
wednesday	su-yo-il	su-i-yo-bi
thursday	mok-yo-il	mo-ku-yo-bi
friday	keum-yo-il	kin-yo-bi
saturday	to-yo-il	to-yo-bi

note that "il-" and "nichi-" both can refer to the "first day".

but other critical words, which would clearly indicate genetic relationships between languages, differ:

meaning	korean	japanese
mother	um-ma	haha
father	ap-pa	chichi
rice	bap	gohan

the sound "hui" doesn't quite exist in korean. its closest analog would probably be "hwi": ~whistling.
english --> korean
"democracy" --> "min-ju-ju-i"
"electricity" --> "chun-gi"
"vodka" --> "wo-du-ka"
"helicopter" --> "her-i-kop-tuh"

[Serb]

Does the word "hui" exist in Chinese or Japanese?