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> ...which I can't say about any other SEA language. Phonetic spellings, Latin alphabet, no tonal sounds, dead easy grammar and a million loan words you already

• Squealer2642 10mo ago
  Both are Austronesian languages
• duffyjp 10mo ago
  I've never studied it, but my understanding is that like Japanese, Tagalog has the pitched/stressed thing going on. My wife is Japanese and holy cow I can't tell the difference. Bridge or Chopstick? No idea, they sound exactly the same to my ears... I'm pretty fluent, but my pronunciation was as good as it's gonna get like 10 years ago which is a frustration.
  • throwaway2037 10mo ago
    In Japan/ese, the pitch/stress thing is overrated, and so are regional language differences. When natives point it out to me, it strikes me a little more than cultural gatekeeping. Linguistic context matters much more. How often are you listening to your own native language and you are confused by two words that sounds similar (like 'hashi' in Japanese for bridge/chopsticks)? Almost never. Advice: Ignore it when natives that criticise your pronunciation. Ask them how is their German or Thai is... and they will freeze with shame. Where I come from, to criticise a non-native speakers accent or small grammatical errors (that do not impact the meaning) is a not-so-subtle form of discrimination. As a result, I never do it. (To criticise myself, it tooks many, many years to see this about my home culture and stop doing it myself.) Still, many people ask me: "Hey, can you correct my <language X> when I speak it?" "Sure!" (but I never do.)
    • Muromec 10mo ago
      >How often are you listening to your own native language and you are confused by two words that sounds similar It confuses the hell out of me when non-natives misplace stress in Ukrainian and use wrong cases. It's that I want to gatekeep, but above certain rate of mistakes it's just difficult to follow what is being said.
      • BlaDeKke 10mo ago
        Since the war, we have a lot of Ukrainians at our Flemish school. We just make it work, no time for gatekeeping.
        • throwaway2037 10mo ago
          > We just make it work, no time for gatekeeping. This is nice to hear. A real win. Real question (because it took me, sadly, too long to learn it as an adult): Why don't they gatekeep? Do you think there is compassion for those who fled war in Ukraine, so people are more forgiving about linguistic and cultural differences?
          • kjs3 10mo ago
            Does "I'm just not going to be a dick to these people for ultimately trivial reasons" really need an explanatory framework in your world?
            • throwaway2037 10mo ago
              The GP wrote: > at our Flemish school I assumed this meant high school or earlier (18 and under). Most kids I grew up with (including myself) wouldn't be mature enough to do this without explicit instruction (and some policing!). That is why I want to understand more. Example: Did they have a big school meeting where they explained to local kids: "There are bunch of war refugees coming. Here are some things we can do to make them feel more welcome. First: Don't criticize their accent when they are speaking Flemish/Dutch." It is also interesting from the lens of Belgian linguistic culture, as the country is broadly divided north is Flemish, south is French and a tiny part is German.
    • wahnfrieden 10mo ago
      Says it’s overrated and non semantic… on authority of what? Being foreign to it and not knowing the language, naturally
    • bugglebeetle 10mo ago
      Japanese actually has a much smaller set of phonemes (~half as many as English), resulting in extensive homophones. When combined with its greater tendency toward ambiguity, correct use of pitch can actually have a larger impact on intelligibility, as compared to many other languages.
      • throwaway2037 10mo ago
        [flagged]
        • bugglebeetle 10mo ago
          [flagged]
        • gosub100 10mo ago
          People are allowed to disagree with you. Your caricature of them doesn't add to the conversation.
        • CorrectHorseBat 10mo ago
          Nice theory, but my experience is exactly the other way around. Even after several years of learning Chinese I still had trouble communicating with Chinese people, especially those who had no experience talking to foreigners. When I arrived in China and asked the way to the university I was going to (which was close by and very famous) they just didn't get what I was saying. In the end I had to show them the written word. I don't speak Japanese, but when I arrived and said the name of the city and they immediately understood where I wanted to go. After my experience with Chinese I was flabbergasted that that went so smooth. I blame the tones in Chinese (which I admit I'm not very good at)
          • adrian_b 10mo ago
            I think that you are right that your problem must have been caused more by the Chinese tones than by any other characteristic of Chinese, and perhaps also from some of their consonants that do not have a straightforward English equivalent. On the other hand, the Japanese pronunciation is one of the easiest in the world to learn, even taking into account the subtleties of pitch.
    • Greduan 10mo ago
      Well imagine somebody was talking about "bass" the fish, in a context of "bass" the instrument. If they pronounced it like the fish, certainly for a moment your language processing would stop, figure it out, fill in the gap, and continue. Every time the wrong pitch accent is used, a similar process takes place. Especially in highly complex conversations, where a lot of processing power is going towards the semantics itself, and hopefully the person shouldn't have to worry about figuring out which word the other person is saying. It's unclear if you yourself have native-level (or close to) pitch accent yourself. But if you don't, how can you know whether it's actually important or not?
      • roughly 10mo ago
        Just remember, you can tune an instrument, but you can’t tuna fish.
        • dredmorbius 10mo ago
          <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Can_Tune_a_Piano,_but_You_Can%27t_Tuna_Fish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Can_Tune_a_Piano,_but_You_...> (originally by Groucho Marx: <https://ultimateclassicrock.com/kevin-cronin-reo-speedwagon-tuna-fish-album/ https://ultimateclassicrock.com/kevin-cronin-reo-speedwagon-...>). Or perhaps more HN-appropriate: <https://unixhistory.livejournal.com/1808.html https://unixhistory.livejournal.com/1808.html>.
        • saltcured 10mo ago
          Eh, in a discussion about homophones, homonyms, and ambiguity, I prefer the variant, "you can tune a bass, but you can tuna fish". Right up there with "fruit flies like a banana, but time flies like an arrow".
      • deleted 10mo ago
        [deleted]
    • bamboozled 10mo ago
      Strong agree
    • danielscrubs 10mo ago
      I correct my kids when they do mistakes, how else would they improve? Calling people racist when they try to be helpful might say more about you than them. I mean what I say and say what I mean is also something worth striving for.
      • ryan_lane 10mo ago
        Other adults aren't your kids, and it isn't your place to correct them, unless they ask for help.
    • deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
    • omaewabaka 10mo ago
      As a Japanese, I will mention that I've seen Japanese people correct each other on this, both in private and in public. Its because we might get the meaning by context, but if you pronounce it wrong, it sounds very strange in that context where its clearly wrong... To default to an assumption that this is due to racism / cultural gatekeeping says a whole lot about your world view and perception about Japanese people and culture than it does my people. For example, examine your own words when you say that where you come from its a subtle form of discrimination. Well, you are saying it yourself that an action is deemed discriminatory according to the standards of your own culture, not to the standards of the other culture. You realize that could be cultural misunderstanding? There is a word for evaluating another culture by the standards of one's own culture: ethnocentrism. If you are actually living in Japan, you should self-reflect a bit about what problems you face that you attribute subconsciously in your head to malicious intent, rather than cultural misunderstanding. Anyways, I'm often disappointed by the comment section on this website when its anything about Japanese people. This is just another reminder for me to avoid the comments.
      • tanjtanjtanj 10mo ago
        I mean there are widely spoken regional dialects that make no pitch distinction between the pronounciation of 橋 and 箸. You may get looked down on for not speaking the Queen's English (I mean standard Tokyo Japanese) but you are still speaking fully correct Japanese.
        • throwaway2037 10mo ago
          This is exactly why I say it is nothing but cultural/linguistic gatekeeping. Even natives between regions disagree on the "correct" way to pronouce these terms. This further proves to me how little Japanese varies throughout the country. It is freakishly regular for the size of Japan. Consider a place like UK with four constituent countries: England, Wales, Scotland, and North Ireland (not to mention the channel islands and other oddities). They range of accents (without huge mountain ranges!) is wildly different. And the change in vocabulary for vernacular speech is far larger than the United States, which Google AI tells me is 40x larger(!).
  • spacechild1 10mo ago
    Japanese pitch accent actually varies across regions. Some have no pitch accent at all! I think this shows that it's not very important unless you want to sound like a native speaker. I never bothered to learn the "standard" pitch accents but I tend to imitate the Kansai pitch accent of my wife :)
    • wahnfrieden 10mo ago
      Kagoshima where there is no pitch accent is like a different language entirely though, and nearly unintelligible
      • numpad0 10mo ago
        Native Kyushu conversations are literally unintelligible to me as a Japanese speaker. There are actually numerous Japanese dialects and accents that aren't so mutually intelligible, though of course post-TV generations understand TV Japanese. That's kind of a secret to how CJK languages are each supposedly being a unique linguistic isolates: the rest of the families are hiding in the "dialects".
• csomar 10mo ago
  Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia and the Philippines share a lot (language, food, genetics and customs). Look up Austronesian people. They do exist as minorities in Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. After a while (4 years so far in SEA), you get to notice them in these countries among the masses.
• adrian_b 10mo ago
  They are both Austronesian languages (also related to the Polynesian languages), so the similarity is not due to coincidence. In SEA there are also other completely unrelated language families besides Austronesian, e.g. the Thai language and the Khmer language belong to different language families with no relationships to Austronesian languages, like Malaysian (besides recent linguistic borrowings between neighbors). All Austronesian languages are simple phonetically. Also the phonetic simplicity of Japanese is likely to have been caused by an Austronesian substrate related to that of the aborigine Taiwanese people.
  • wk_end 10mo ago
    > Also the phonetic simplicity of Japanese is likely to have been caused by an Austronesian substrate related to that of the aborigine Taiwanese people. That's being asserted with too much confidence, I think. While I was aware some kind of Austronesian connection has been suggested, as far as I know there's zero actual consensus among linguists on any kind of relationship between Japanese and any other language family. Like, there's theories relating Japanese to everything from Korean to Turkish to Greek floating around - but nothing to my knowledge that we should really be describing as "likely" at the point, even a connection with the grammatically extremely similar Korean. Now that said, I don't know a lot about the Austronesian languages or this particular hypothesis. I did find an article about a possible Austronesian substratum ("Does Japanese have an Austronesian stratum?" by Ann Kumar), but it seemed mostly preoccupied with drawing that connection through similarities in vocabulary rather than phonology. Do you have pointers to scholarly sources on the subject?
    • adrian_b 10mo ago
      Japanese is likely to have been a hybrid language, somewhat similar with many European languages that had both a substrate and a superstrate, e.g. a Romance language like French had a Celtic substrate and a Germanic superstrate. However, in the case of such European languages the 3 combined languages were not radically different, but they belonged to the same great language family, only to different branches. For Japanese, its sources have come from completely unrelated language families, which is the probable cause of the difficulties in determining the affinities of Japanese. The grammar of Japanese is very similar to its Western neighbor, i.e. Korean, while its phonology is very similar to its Southern neighbor, i.e. the Austronesian languages of Ancient Taiwan and Philippines. On the other hand, for the vocabulary of native Japanese, before it incorporated the huge amount of borrowings from Chinese, it has been more difficult to find relationships with other languages. Besides the Southern and Western influences, Japanese was also affected by a Northern influence, from people related to Ainu. As there are no old enough recorded sources about languages related to Ainu, it is possible that many of the words that do not appear to have a Southern or Western source may have come from a Northern contribution to the Japanese language. I did not find any linguistic publication that does an adequate analysis of the relationships of Japanese with other languages. To be fair, such an analysis would require a huge amount of work, because unlike for Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic languages, where a large amount of texts have been preserved from several millennia ago, when the evolution of the languages had not changed most words so much as to make their correspondences in related languages unrecognizable, for Japanese many of the languages related to those which have contributed to the formation of Japanese have probably disappeared before leaving any written records. A credible analysis of the possible relationships of Japanese would require the compilation of a great amount of information about poorly documented languages, in order to try to reconstruct their earlier stages, where similarities with Old Japanese could be identified. Korean has old written records, but only about as old as Japanese itself, so those are not very helpful to reconstruct the stage from many centuries before, which could have provided a component of Japanese. A language related to Korean appears to have contributed to Japanese, but only as a late superstrate that has applied a new grammar on the vocabulary inherited from the previous inhabitants of the islands. The language providing this superstrate was probably the language of the Yayoi people, who immigrated in Japan more than two thousand years ago. For the Southern and Northern languages that could have contributed to the vocabulary and phonology of the language of Japan before the Yayoi immigration, there are extremely low chances of becoming able to reconstruct them as they were a few millennia ago, so it is unlikely that the origin of Japanese will ever be known with certainty. Still, the fact that the languages that share features with Japanese are exactly its former neighbors in the 3 directions besides the Ocean (from before Taiwan became Chinese), is not surprising at all, but it is exactly what would be expected. What are not known are the details of what exactly each source has contributed and when did this happen.