@freemo Roots of the language and of the writing system are not necessarily the same. There were multiple instances of significant import of "characters" from ~Chinese into Japanese and I had the impression that at least some of them didn't import much past the characters themselves.
Id love to ubderstand how that developed. Importing a writing system but not a language only seems possible at all with logograms which is kinda cool.
Huh? Isn't that the case with all languages that use Latin alphabet but aren't romance?
Then Japan didn't really acquire the writing system from China. The grammar is iiuc very different, and at some points in history characters were imported for the pronunciation, ignoring their meaning.
@robryk @freemo The grammar is indeed very different, but they imported lots of characters for their meaning but used their own pronunciation. On the other hand, there are different readings and kanji sometimes are used for their original chinese pronunciation. It is said that the Japanese writing system is one of the most complicated ones in existence.
@robryk @digastricus
Yea im clueless on the asian side of this equation sadly