oh wow, as someone that watches anime often, yeah now kinda recall many instances of that.
I noticed that kawaii sound very close mandarin’s 可爱 (kě aì) but then was a bit confused by it when later a monster shows up or something to that extent then then i feel like they said the same word, but judging from context and intonation (and subtitles was on of course), I just assume it originated from 可恶 (kě wù) and the sound just shifted over time due to geographical separation.
Unrelated: When I first heard Daijoubou, I thought it was supposed to be 大家没事吧 cuz the dà
jiā sounds very close to Daijou
I feel like half the time I just make assumptions about a Japanese word’s etymology based on a Sinitic language and try to encode it to memory that way. I mean whatever helps my brain make sense of foreign words and so it kinda served as a memory aid thing. Cuz like Japanese sometimes has words that sound so close you can just map it to another language you already know with some made up etymology regardless if its true lolm
For government, admin, science, etc. if you can guess how middle chinese (a wu variety IIRC, but I might be misremembering) would have evolved in Japan, you’ll probably be right.
Japanese kawaii (cute) and kowai (scary) is pretty amusing
oh wow, as someone that watches anime often, yeah now kinda recall many instances of that.
I noticed that kawaii sound very close mandarin’s 可爱 (kě aì) but then was a bit confused by it when later a monster shows up or something to that extent then then i feel like they said the same word, but judging from context and intonation (and subtitles was on of course), I just assume it originated from 可恶 (kě wù) and the sound just shifted over time due to geographical separation.
Unrelated: When I first heard Daijoubou, I thought it was supposed to be 大家没事吧 cuz the dà jiā sounds very close to Daijou
I feel like half the time I just make assumptions about a Japanese word’s etymology based on a Sinitic language and try to encode it to memory that way. I mean whatever helps my brain make sense of foreign words and so it kinda served as a memory aid thing. Cuz like Japanese sometimes has words that sound so close you can just map it to another language you already know with some made up etymology regardless if its true lolm
For government, admin, science, etc. if you can guess how middle chinese (a wu variety IIRC, but I might be misremembering) would have evolved in Japan, you’ll probably be right.