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Sino-Japanese, or Kango (??) in Japanese, refers to that portion of the Japanese vocabulary that originated in the Chinese language or has been created from elements borrowed from Chinese. Some grammatical or sentence patterns can also be identified with Sino-Japanese. Sino-Japanese vocabulary is referred to in Japanese as kango (??), meaning 'Chinese words'. Kango is one of three broad categories into which the Japanese vocabulary is divided. The others are native Japanese vocabulary (ja:???? yamato kotoba or ja:?? wago) and borrowings from mainly Western languages ??? (gairaigo). Approximately 60% of the words contained in a modern Japanese dictionary is estimated to consist of kango,[1] and it forms about 18% of words used in speech, as measured by the National Institute for Japanese Language in its study of language use in NHK broadcasts from April to June, 1989.[2]

Background

China's large territory and advanced culture led Chinese to exert an enormous influence on Japanese, Korean, and other East Asian languages throughout history, in a manner somewhat similar to Latin's preeminent position in European history. At the time of their first contact, the Japanese language had no writing system, while the Chinese had a written language and a great deal of academic information, providing new concepts along with Chinese words to express them. Chinese became the language of science, learning and religion. The earliest written language to be used in Japan was literary Chinese, which has come to be called kanbun in this context. The kanbun writing system essentially required every literate Japanese to be competent in written Chinese, although it is unlikely that many Japanese people were then fluent in spoken Chinese. Chinese pronunciation was approximated in words borrowed from Chinese into Japanese; this Sino-Japanese vocabulary is still an important component of the Japanese language, and may be compared to words of Latin or Greek origin in English.

Chinese borrowings also significantly impacted Japanese phonology, leading to many new developments such as closed syllables (CVC, not just CV) and Length becoming a phonetic feature with the development of both long vowels and long consonants – see Early Middle Japanese: Phonological developments.

[edit] Sino-Japanese and On'yomi

The term kango is usually identified with on'yomi (???, "sound reading"), a system of pronouncing Chinese characters in a way that at one stage approximated the original Chinese. On'yomi is also known as the 'Sino-Japanese reading', and is opposed to kun'yomi (???, "reading by meaning") under which Chinese characters are assigned to, and read as, native Japanese vocabulary.

However, there are cases where the distinction between on'yomi and kun'yomi does not correspond to etymological origin. Chinese characters created in Japan, called kokuji (??^?), normally only have kun'yomi, but some kokuji have on'yomi. One such character is ? (as in ?? hataraku, "to work"), which was given the on'yomi d? (from the on'yomi of its phonetic, ?) when used in compounds with other characters, e.g. ?? r?d? ("labor"). The character ? ("gland"), which has the on'yomi sen (from the on'yomi of its phonetic, ?), e.g. ??? hent?sen "tonsils", was intentionally created as a 'kango' and does not have a kun'yomi at all. Although not originating in Chinese, both of these are regarded as 'Sino-Japanese'.

By the same token, kun-yomi is not a guarantee that a word is native Japanese. There are a few Japanese words that, although they appear to have originated in borrowings from Chinese, have such a long history in the Japanese language that they are regarded as native and are thus treated as kun'yomi, e.g., ? uma "horse" and ? ume. These words are not regarded as belonging to the Sino-Japanese vocabulary. from wiki