There is also a language section under Japan which discusses the affinities between Chinese, Korean and Japanese . 5. The Ural-Altaic family is described That the name of cuckoo is applied also to the female and young, and at other than the singing season, and then to related species which do not make the same sound-all helps to show the essentially conventional character of even this name. An analogous process of elimination of original meaning, and reduction to the value of conventional designation merely, is to be seen in every part of language throughout its whole history. makes human speech alike in the character of its beginnings and in the general features of its after-history. Everywhere among men a certain store of expression, body of traditional signs of thought, being given, as used by a certain community, it is capable of increase on certain accordant lines, and only on them. In some languages, and under peculiar circumstances, borrowing is a great means of increase; but it is the most external and least Thus, for instance, the sound of the short so-called Italian a in English has become exchanged for the peculiarly English sound in man , hat , &c., which is so exclusively used and practised now by English speakers that they feel great difficulty in pronouncing the Italian sound, which at an earlier period was almost as frequent in English as in any other language that has preserved the Italian sound up to the present day. Again, the sound of the so-called long English a in make , paper , &c., although once a monophthong, is now pronounced as a diphthong, combining the sounds of the English short e and i , and no trace of the old monophthong is left, except where it was followed by r , as in hare , mare (also air , their , where , &c.), where the a has a broader sound somewhat approaching that of the short a in hat . This last instance may at the same time serve to illustrate the restrictions made above as to sounds changing their pronunciation in certain groups or combinations, or under given circumstances only. We may learn from it that phonetic change need not always affect the same original sound in the same way in all its combinations, but that neighbouring sounds often influence the special direction in which the sound is modified. The different sounds of the English a in make and hare are both equivalents of the same Old English sound ă (＝the Italian short a ) in macian , hara . The latter sound has been split in two, but this process again has taken place with perfect regularity, the one sound appearing before r , the other before all other consonants. It is easy to see that the common practice of comprising the history of the Old English a in the one rule—that it was changed into the sound of the ă in make except when followed by an r —can only be defended on the practical ground that this rule is convenient to remember, because the words exhibiting the former change are more numerous than the instances of the latter, apart from this there is nothing to justify the assumption that one of these changes is the rule and the other the exception. On the one hand, it is only with the greatest difficulty that muscles for many years accustomed to perform one set of movements can be forced into performing another set which are very similar but yet not identical; on the other hand, to an untrained ear the difference between the two sounds may remain unappreciated. The result is that the new language is pronounced with the sounds of the speaker’s original language. If the new language is adopted by a whole people to whom it was originally foreign, the children naturally learn it from their parents with the sounds of the old language which has now become obsolete. It would not have been surprising therefore if in Modern English the plural of child had been childs. But in spite of the common tendency to make the plural of all noun-stems in - s , child has gone in the opposite direction and has not only maintained its - r , but has added to it the - en of stems like oxen and eyen . In Wiclif we find a similar plural to calf, calveren , but here calves has long replaced in the literary language both the earlier forms. ( b ) Let us now take another instance from the English verb. When one form or set of forms ousts other varying forms from the same paradigm, the change is described variously as material or logical analogy. Inasmuch as a similar process of levelling to that seen in rode has been carried through in all preterites of Modern English, regularity prevails even here, though a few traces of the old conflict are still visible in such poetic forms as sung for the preterite side by side with sang . Thus, the adjectives like and similar are followed by the preposition to (though in Modern English like need have no preposition), and upon the analogy of such words, different and averse , with which correct speakers and writers couple from , are by no means rarely followed by to . Nor is it uncommon to hear or to see differ with instead of differ from , upon the analogy of agree with . Curiously enough, Latin, from which differ is descended, is found to follow the same analogy even in good writers Thus Cicero ( Academica Pr . ii. 143) combines dissidere with cum , as later does Seneca ( Epistulae , 18. 1). 3. Hamitic Languages .—The central article in this family is Hamitic Languages , which is supplemented, so far as the Cushitic or Ethiopian group is concerned, by further information in the articles Egypt ; Ethiopia ; Abyssinia ; Somaliland , and, so far as the Libyan group is concerned, by the articles Berbers and Kabyles . 4. The chief feature of the Monosyllabic family is the section Language under China , supplemented again by similar sections in articles on other countries of south-eastern Asia, and by the article Tibeto-Burman Languages . There is also a language section under Japan which discusses the affinities between Chinese, Korean and Japanese. 5.

Supralaryngeal implementation of length and laryngeal contrasts in Japanese and Korean | Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique | Cambridge Core Search --- Institution Login Search Hostname: page-component-75d7c8f48-ghqh7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-03-21T04:12:35.553Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false - English - Français # Supralaryngeal implementation of length and laryngeal contrasts in Japanese and Korean Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2017 Alexei Kochetov and Yoonjung Kang Show author details --- * al.kochetov@utoronto.ca --- Article contents - Abstract - Footnotes - References Get access Share Cite Rights & Permissions --- ## Abstract This article investigates supralaryngeal characteristics of Japanese and Korean length and laryngeal contrasts in stops and affricates. Electropalatography data collected from five Japanese and five Korean speakers revealed similar differences among the consonants in the degree of linguopalatal contact and duration of the closure. Japanese (voiceless) geminate and Korean fortis obstruents were most constricted and had the longest duration (althoug

# Why do Korean and Japanese sound similar to each other to native speakers of English? Tags: japanese, korean, spoken-language - Score: 10 - Views: 20137 - Answers: 6 - Answered: yes - Asked by: Golden Cuy (1264 rep) - Asked: 2017-07-01 - Edited: 2018-02-11 - Site: linguistics ## Question I don't understand why, but Korean and Japanese sound very similar to me, and also to other native speakers of English. I think I once read a comment saying something like "If it sounds like Japanese but you can't understand what is being said, then it's Korean". What characteristics, apart from the lack of tones, are shared by the two languages making them sound similar? And what explanations, apart from the Altaic Hypothesis, are there for the two languages being similar for those characteristics? ## Answers ### Answer by user6726 (score: 9 [ACCEPTED]) The similarity in sound is the result of two factors: overlapping phonetic inventories, and word length (which affects syllable duration). If you wanted to quantify the similarity, those would be the factors to focus on. The other part of "why" focuses not on what you are reacting to, but what causes the languages to be similar. The best