John Cowan responded:
> > Like the
> > United States today, China has long been a cosmopolitan
> > mixture of many peoples, and many of the conquering minorities
>
> Eh? Do you mean the Mongols and Manchu specifically?
Not so much, although I suppose many of them "sinified"
over the centuries. I was thinking even further back,
to the warring states period and such, when it is less
clear just exactly who is Han and who is not.
> > Kango,
> > instead, means "a Chinese word" or "a Chinese expression",
> > i.e. a lexical item, written in kanji, that is recognized
> > as being derived from China, as opposed to being a
> > Japanese innovation.
>
> I know what you mean, but I have to register a protest against
> the use of "innovation" for native Japanese words.
> It is the Chinese borrowings that are, historically,
> the innovations.
Actually, I wasn't referring to native Japanese vocabulary
with good historical roots in Old Japanese. I was speaking
instead of innovated kanji compounds explicitly created in Japan
and *not* borrowed from China -- the kind of Japanese words
that Chinese will look at and be baffled by.
Example: kippu, the ordinary, common word for "ticket"
in Japanese. Read as Chinese, qie4fu2, the likely response
is "'Cut the tally marker'?? What could these crazy Japanese
mean by that?"
--Ken
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