Hunting down the similar words between Japanese and Turkish

Hunting down the similar words between Japanese and Turkish(ugu.rs)

2 points by ugurnot 3 years ago | 3 comments

jmillikin 3 years ago |

  > I think, for some of the words I will share with you at the end,
  > there is a high likelihood of those words having Chinese roots
  > rather than Japanese.

A rough (but not perfect) way to decide if a Japanese term is derived from Chinese is that it is composed of two or more kanji. Often you'll see a single-kanji word with Japanese pronunciation, and the same kanji in a compound use the Chinese pronunciation.

Examples from the article include 「感情」 (kan-jou), 「同士」 (dou-shi), 「反射」 (han-sha).

I'd also be careful about using jisho.org as a source without cross-checking to make sure you got the correct meaning. Some of the examples given in OP are wrong, for example 「同士」 is a suffix used to indicate a relationship is mutual -- 同僚 (coworker) + 同士 = 同僚同士 (coworkers) -- and 「大きい」 means "large", not "a lot" (which would be 「多い」 (oo-i).

ugurnot 3 years ago | |

Thanks for the input, I was not sure about the 「大きい」either, it is better to remove it. However, for doushi, there is another noun「同志」. Is「同志」a suffix too?

jmillikin 3 years ago | | |

I've never seen 「同志」 used in real life. It seems to be a specialized term comparable to English's "comrade". Wikipedia thinks the Turkish equivalent is "yoldaş".

For the differences between two Japanese words with the same pronunciation and similar meaning, Yahoo Answers is a surprisingly good resource. You can also do web searches like [[ 「同志」と「同士」の違い ]] to find explanation pages. In general homophonic kanji is an area that even native speakers struggle with sometimes, so there's lots of non-English coverage available.

https://detail.chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/qa/question_detail/q10...

"「同志」と「同士」の意味の違いについて教えてください。"