Appendix talk:Japanese Swadesh list (extended)

Native Japanese only?

I've noticed words with Chinese-derived pronunciations in the list. As an example: 'shinrin' = forest. I think somebody needs to check over this list to make sure these words are accurate and actually native Japanese words. 24.13.38.60 20:41, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Re: This list is not accurate. Some words are not in common use, and some are completely wrong: koshi with the kanji shown means lower back, not hair for instance. I'm going to make a few edits that I'm confident about. --210.227.89.70 06:25, 20 February 2013 (UTC)

You're very right to remove the Sinic-derived terms. Thank you for that.

About common use, though, I'm not sure how much weight to give. For instance, watashi for “I” is certainly *common*, but it's also completely irrelevant to translingual glottochronological analyses of pronouns, since it's such a relatively modern invention in the language. For illustrating potentially meaningful connections to other languages, you'd really have to dig back to the earliest attested terms for each Swadesh-list concept. So for “I”, you'd probably want to use 我 (わ, wa; あ, a) instead, a much older word that appears in the w:Kojiki, for instance. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 07:12, 20 February 2013 (UTC)

There are a couple still in here- specifically "fruit" (native word being くだもの/果物) and "meat" (native word being しし). Although the latter is pretty much never used - the Chinese loanword is ubiquitous. 216.206.87.228 10:00, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

This list is not accurate. Addition of any less frequent or even rare or old words here is useful given the high diversity of the genetic origins of the Japanese. Although the language is now overweighted by words brought by some O2b settlers, there may be some traces of old languages such as the Jumon ones. Swadesh list is a scientific method and should always represent the most frequent words current used by its speakers. Less frequent words may be one time high rank Swadesh words, but they may also be loanwords, or a word which never used outside a small area, or even a small class or group of people.Effficientvegetarianpc16 (talk) 07:04, 31 December 2017 (UTC)

@Effficientvegetarianpc16 -- This list is woefully incorrect on many levels, and has been mostly ignored by the JA editing community here as largely irrelevant. If you're truly interested in looking into terms for relatedness to other languages, you need to find the oldest attestable, and oldest reconstructable, forms for a given concept. Innovations that have occurred within Japanese are not relevant to comparisons with other languages -- unless you're attempting to derive general principles for word formation and lexical change, which is not what Swadesh lists were ever intended for (as far as my understanding goes).

Also note that borrowings from Chinese (i.e. 漢語 (kango, “terms derived from Chinese”) and borrowings from other foreign languages (外来語 (gairaigo, literally “foreign-arrival words”)) are also irrelevant for Swadesh comparison purposes, hence the note at the top of the page that "only 和語 words were considered for this list." See 和語 (wago, “native Japanese word”) for more on that.

If you are really interested in updating this list into something at least vaguely useful, let me know -- Japanese etymology is something of an interest for me. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 10:06, 31 December 2017 (UTC)

As we know it, an Asian American living in America is an American, regardless of their origin. I don't know much about Swadesh list, but given Eirikr 's contribution here and to the world I think his words are persuasive.Effficientvegetarianpc16 (talk) 14:53, 31 December 2017 (UTC)

Editing tables

Egad this is tedious. Does anyone know of any easier way of working on datasets like this than directly with the source? I'm tempted to set this up in a spreadsheet, and then export to HTML and regex my way to wikitable goodness. Working directly with the table wikisource in this tiny edit box is making me crosseyed.

I'm using Firefox, for what that might be worth.  :) Help, help! Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi | Tala við mig 21:19, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

IPA

Hi, guys, I know there are several Japanese dialects (even Japonic languages), but could someone please add the IPA transcription of at least one representative? Many thanks!--Petusek 20:55, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

Yes, words from different Japonic languages should be represented here. I am putting them here for the readers. And the current romanized Japanese is not very accurate. For example, [r] is always sound like [l], [ta] in end of a word often sound like [da]. Putting Latin alphabets here would be more readable.Effficientvegetarianpc16 (talk) 03:06, 31 December 2017 (UTC)

I am working on old languages of O2b peoples and relationship between Japanese and Korean. Having come across non-English sources I don't know much, for example http://www.ninjal.ac.jp/publication/catalogue/laj_map and http://dl.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid/1869828 Anyone here knowing Japanese to help? It would benefit readers a lot Effficientvegetarianpc16 (talk) 03:06, 31 December 2017 (UTC)

Dialects

I am on the road to adding Japanese and Korean dialect languages to the lists, in which some of them are facing extinction. The east-west difference of both languages are well known. Given Papua New Guinea, ancient America and Australia have so many different languages developed by a few settlers and high diversity of origins of Japanese and Korean people, those languages may have preserve old words and even substrate from extincted old languages. Those languages spoken in the south, like Jeju and Ryukyu islands, are so different from the standard ones than many Indo-European languages here. As discuss above, dialects have yet to be covered by the list. I would like to add more dialects and words to the list, the sources http://www.ninjal.ac.jp/publication/catalogue/laj_map and http://dl.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid/1869828 are very nice but I don't know much about Japanese. The map given words spoken in hundreds of place in Japan so I put them in 1 column instead of hundred columns. Anyone here knowing Japanese to help? It would benefit readers a lot Effficientvegetarianpc16 (talk) 04:59, 1 January 2018 (UTC)