#japonic

[datasoong47]

Okay, so I’m reading about Miyakoan, a Southern Ryukyuan language in the Japonic family. It has a rather interesting phonology compared to Japanese, with significantly more consonant clusters and syllabic consonants. And I saw this:

Wait, what’s that third one?? The same word is used for both “vulva” and “day”?

[geoazie]

Aesthetic of the languages on earth : Japanese

Japanese is a Japonic language spoken by around 128 millions speakers in Japan and Palau. It is an official language in Japan and in the Angaur Island of Palau.

[yonagunilanguageblog]

[the-linguist-ll]

Japanese is not alone, it has a family. For some reason the Ryukyuan languages are classified as being dialects of Japenese within Japan, despite the fact that they're not even mutually intelligible with eachother let alone a totally different branch of the family, and the fact that they clearly diverged at least as long ago as the Romance language family did from eachother.

Compare Okinawan

う名前や何やいびーが?

(u naamee ta nuu yaibiiga?)

with Japanese

お名前はなんですか?

(o-namae wa nan desu ka)

Meaning "What is your name"

[possessivesuffix]

Speaking of how much Chinese and Japanese have in common though, here's an interesting NeighborNet typological chart of Northeast Asia:

Besides the tripartite Sinitic / Micro-Altaic / Japonic–Korean division, note also features like

modern Japanese and also Ryukyuan drifting closer to Ainu;

Jurchen-Manchu drifting closer to Sinitic and then back again (??);

the relative difficulty of separating "Altaic" from "non-Altaic" languages of NE Asia

Atayal hanging out close to Old Chinese and indeed within the authors' division line for Sinitic (many other SEA languages might fall around here);

Russian hanging out in the upper right between North Tungusic and Yukaghir (in a larger network most of Indo-European and also Uralic would probably attach somewhere around here).

(from Yurayong & Szeto 2020: (De-)Altaicisation as convergence and divergence between Japonic and Koreanic languages)

[soliloquyinthedark]

“Woman Applying Powder [Portrait of Nakatani Tsuru]” (1918) by Goyō Hashiguchi (Japanese, 1880-1921)

[tancrator]