Japanese and "Sino-English"

The Japanese language calls itself 日本語 nihongo. The Chinese characters (漢字 kanji) each mean "sun root language", thus "Rising-Sun [Nation] Language". (The Tang-era Middle Chinese pronunciation of the characters is something like *nyit-pón-ngyú. In modern Mandarin, it is rìběnyǔ.)

Japanese itself, however, is not related to Chinese. Its family affiliation is unknown, and may be an isolate (unless the Okinawan languages are considered separate, then there would be a Japonic language family), but some linguists have argued it is related to Korean, and others claim both are Altaic, and thus distantly related to Mongolian and the Turkic languages. It does have a similar grammar to these, having a subject-object-verb word order, agglutinative typology with suffixes and possibly remnants of vowel harmony. However, genetic relation is established through regular sound correspondences in cognates, and few have been found, especially in comparison to Indo-European languages.

The words of Chinese origin, usually written using kanji, are called Sino-Japanese. Most kanji have two pronunciations, called 音読み on'yomi and 訓読み kun'yomi, meaning "sound reading" and "meaning reading" respectively. The on'yomi is the reading derived from Middle Chinese, but conforming to Japanese phonetics (tones are lost, as Japanese is non-tonal). The kun'yomi is the native Japanese word. An example is the word for "sword", 刀. In on'yomi, it is called tō, from MC *tau. In kun'yomi, it is the well-known name for the "sword", katana. In isolation, kun'yomi are generally used; in compounds, on'yomi, e.g. 日本刀 nihontō "Japanese sword".

(Korean too contains words of Chinese origin, but Chinese characters, called hanja in that language, are no longer commonly used. The phonetic hangul alphabet is generally used instead. Japanese uses two syllabries for phonetic writing when needed, called kana: hiragana for native words and suffixes; katakana for foreign words and onomatopoeia. Vietnamese, which too has many words of Chinese origin, once used Chinese characters, called chữ nôm, but now exclusively uses a Latin-based alphabet.)

Chinese words began to be inherited into Japanese because of the influence of Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism on the island nation. (This also resulted in Shintoism, the originally shamanistic indigenous faith, becoming syncretic.) A similar phenomenon is the inclusion of Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek and Latin words in European languages, due to Christianity. However, English, Spanish, French, German and Russian do not use Hebrew or Greek letters to write Biblical words (though both Latin and Cyrillic are alphabets derived from Greek).

To get a better idea, imagine if many words, and word roots, used Chinese characters. For example, Chinese could be written "漢ese", and either pronounced "Chinese" or "Hanese". The word for "car" (automobile) in Japanese is 自動車 jidōsha (literally "self-moving cart"); in Sino-English, it could be pronounced "jidungcha" or "automobile" (or just "car").

And this leads to my idea of using Chinese characters with English (or any given language) as a "shorthand" in communications using a limited number of characters, such as Twitter with its 140-character limit.

This is actually related to the story of my planned Third Symphony, only it is about a Chinese person, whose native language is 9th century (Tang Dynasty) Middle Chinese, but after being cursed with immortality and forced to wander the world, his language gradually adopted words and even grammar from diverse languages until his return to China in the 21st century.