From: stlin@stevelin.Eng.Sun.COM (Steven Lin)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.china,soc.culture.taiwan,soc.culture.korean,soc.culture.japan
Subject: Re: Hus Fu and the Japanese
Date: 24 Dec 1992 18:52:02 GMT
Organization: Sun
NNTP-Posting-Host: stevelin

In article <1hbcbgINNmou@agate.berkeley.edu>  (Henry Robertson) writes:
>I don't understand what the fuss is about.  It's obvious to anyone that the
>Japanese are predominantly of East Asian descent, not Polynesian or 
>Caucasian.  Japanese assert their difference from the Chinese because of the
>difference in linguistics. 

I have found the related postings on SCC once for a while in the past four
years and none comes up convincible argument, while some of Japanese netters
tend to deny the Chinese netter have no reliable source to convince people.
While the Japanese intend to rewrite their history of invasion of China and
the mass masscare in north eastern China and many cities, in particular the
capital of Nanjing, the research evidence may serve the Japanese, it was so
guailty that a branch of Chinese descendents, the Japanese, came homeland 
to kill many millions of brotherhood Chinese.

> The written language is adopted from Chinese,
>but the grammar & spoken language is completely dissimilar.  Japanese has a
>range of classifications from Altaic to Malayo-Polynesian.  

This assertion to Chinese people is not convincible. Many postings stated that
the current Japanese speaking language has many similarity with Cantonese,
the Min-nan. Because all of these were considered as ancient Chinese languages,
or dialects, those were spoken in central China. After various enviornmental
change and wars, people moved to east, to south or Pacific islands, therefore
the isolation of long time was a major factor that caused the language differed.
However, the major Japanese writing is Chinese with various simplification or
transformed, that was believed that the Japanese lost the connection with China
and so they forgot Chinese writing partially or completely. The Japanese 
scholars also found their ways of inventing auxilary writing in complementary of 
lost Chinese writing in order to make expression more complete.
This theory also holds in Chinese people. Though, Chinese people speak various
of dialects, they have common writing and unique writing too.

That long period of isolation was believed there were various of tributal wars
inside the Japan. Soon after that, the Japanese appeared in Chinese record 
again while the Japanese sent many people to China to learn various skills.
Many studies proved the recent Japanese temples, houses and cloth were the
ancient Chinese style, particular of Tang Dynasty.

>Then in the Heian era proto-Japanese
>adopted Chinese written language, introducing more vocabulary and a 
>written language.  There is evidence that the phonemes of Japanese pronunciations
>have changed considerably over time, with scientific proof that it did so
>since the Heian era.  Therefore, it is just as likely that Japanese
>pronunciatiosn were considerably Sinofied during the Heian era, from the 
>previous Polynesian-like Ryukyuan language.  Since MacArthur's occupation,
>considerable modifications have been made to the "standard" Tokyo Japanese
>as taught in schools, summarily to make it easier for foreigners to learn.
>