100 words for Joy - Part Two
June 21st 2008 07:21
100 Words for Joy
Part Two
Part Two
I originally started taking notes on this topic because I was planning two other projects, one an essay or book on Happiness and the other a possible poster.
In yesterday's post I promised to tell you where some of the words came from.
Fellow Verbophiles probably noticed many of the words seemed to come from the Chinese dialect group?
One anomaly that strike me while doing the research was that Japanese seemed to far less words than Chinese? Most of the Jpanese words had developed from loan words from Chinese and many of these had the same "KUN" reading YOROKOBU or Yorokobashii or similar.
I will not repeat all the dialect variants this time.
The Chinese words I found that also exist as loans in Sino-Korean, Sino-Japanese, and Sino-Vietnamese are these in Pini-YIN
YUE Kuai Kang Xi Huan Xin Le Xiang FuXiu Yi Qing and another Xiang.
Because Yue derives from an earlier word that had initial - * NG the ON reading in Jpanese is ETSU with no KUN reading. The words starting with *X or *HS in W-G often start with H in Cantonese or Hokkien or Vietnamese. Le however becomes RAKU or Tanoshii in Japanese.
Tomorrow or Monday I'll give the European words.
| 48 |
| Vote |
Add To: 
subscribe to this blog
