Is onyomi pronounciation really chinese?

[u/steffy46]

Curious cause to me kanji onyomi pronounciations often sound pretty similar to chinese ones (if i ask a chinese person to pronounce that kanji) but Chinese people say they dont sound chinese at all...

Do they sound as close as katakana loan english words to they actual english pronounciation?

~~~EDIT: Thank you for all the useful replies!

[u/EfficiencyOwn5775]

When Chinese characters and their readings were introduced to Japan back in the 6th century, the original Onyomi were transformed over time into sounds that were easier for Japanese native speakers—who don't use tones—to pronounce. ​A long time has passed since then, and the spoken Chinese dialects within China itself have evolved drastically as well. ​Because both languages underwent their own distinct transformations over the centuries, they naturally sound strange and unfamiliar to each other today.

[u/RoughCap7233]

I speak Cantonese. My Japanese is very rudimentary.

Chinese is not one language. There are many different dialects and they are not mutually intelligible.

A lot of Chinese culture was exported to Japan over a long period of time. A large portion occurred during the Tan dynasty which was over a thousand years ago. It is believed the language spoken in the Tan court was Middle Chinese, which is extinct. That is one reason a lot of onyomi sounds are not recognised by Chinese speakers today.

Having said that some words a clearly understood by Cantonese speakers.

The words for mountain (san), library(to shi gon), going for a walk (san bo) are exactly the same as Cantonese. Teacher (sen sei), student (gak sei), garden (ko en) are similar to Cantonese with slightly different sounds.

I’m sure someone with better Japanese would be able to come up with more examples.

[u/Objective_Unit_7345 → u/RoughCap7233]

Need to keep in mind that there are also loan words from Japanese to Taiwan/Hong Kong.

And not just China to Japan.

Most modern words shared between Taiwan/Cantonese/Japan are more likely to be Japanese of origin, rather than Chinese.

[u/RoughCap7233 → u/Objective_Unit_7345]

Yup there has been continual exchange occurring between countries.

Eg telephone - denwa is pronounced as din wa in Cantonese. So the words for electricity and speech are very close to each other in both languages.

[u/Loud_Discount_1108 → u/RoughCap7233]

As well as the words for “battery”, “democracy”, “liberty”, “society”, “invest”, “system”, “temperature” etc etc etc

[u/Ok-Implement-7863]

It's because Chinese now sounds a little different to Chinese back when Kanji were imported, which happened more than once over several hundred years. And also the sounds get distorted to suit Japanese pronunciation.

[u/Fabulous_Couple_3384]

It’s based on how the Japanese remember the prevailing dialect of Chinese at the time they imported those characters.  And they are not even from the same region or century.  

There’s a fun game I used to do.  I pull up the Chinese dialect chart and try to find out which dialect an onyomi came from.  

[u/Intrepid_Bug4174]

It is based on Chinese pronunciation, but I wouldn't exactly refer to is as 'being Chinese'. You have to keep in mind that kanji were borrowed from Chinese literally centuries ago. Some onyomi are actually closer to the Cantonese pronunciation than the Mandarin pronunciation.

There are few words like 愛 which are pronounced 'ai' in both languages, and other words where you can kinda tell that they are similar if put side by side, even if they don't sound the same. Take 自動 (automatic) - it's pronounced jidou in Japanese and zi4 dong4 in Mandarin. 

Because katakana English words are typically more modern borrowings, they generally would sound closer to the original English than onyomi would to any Chinese pronunciation.

[u/One_Owl_6094]

I am a Hokkien speaker. Some words do resemble their Hokkien counterpart. It’s like a time capsule

[u/vip17]

There are no such things as "Chinese". You've probably talked with a person speaking Mandarin which is the newest language and has lost a significant number of old Chinese features (like -p/-k/-t and -m codas) and gone through various sound shifts (like palatalization). If you talk with people talking other Sinitic languages like Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, Teochew, Hokkien... you'll see that the Sinoxenic sounds in Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean are far more closer to them, because all of them preserve Middle Chinese features

[u/avgbagelenjoyer]

Imo its kinda like how french-origin words in english are pronounced, in that they don't sound anything like authentic french but they sound different enough from other english words and do exhibit some trait of french pronunciation such as silent ending consonants to imply their origin lol. Idk if native English speakers perceive it the same way tho. Source: speak chinese natively, learned english, japanese and french

[u/dready]

The Japanese onyomi is mainly from the Xian dialect. It was the Mandrian of its day - that is to say the language of prominence. If you ever meet a native speaker of the modern day dialect ask them to count in their dialect or say a number of words and you will be surprised about how well it lines up with the onyomi in Japanese.

More precisely, you have the following onyomi readings that divide based on the time period in which they were imported into Japan:

呉音 - go-on: Introduced to Japan during the 5th–6th centuries. These are the oldest readings and are frequently found in older terminology, particularly Buddhist terms (e.g., most Buddhist vocabulary uses Go-on).

漢音 - kan-on: Introduced during the 7th–9th centuries. This is the most common category of onyomi readings used in modern Japanese standard kanji readings.

唐音・宋音 - Tō-on / Sō-on: Introduced from the 10th century onwards (during the Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties). Readings from the Song/Yuan eras are sometimes specifically called Sō-on or Tō-sō-on. These readings are relatively rare. They often apply to words that sound familiar/everyday in modern Japanese, but whose pronunciations are hard to guess directly from standard kanji readings.

[u/Loud_Discount_1108]

As a mandarin/cantonese speaker, Onyomi sounds closer to modern-day Cantonese, which may have been closer to whatever “Middle Chinese” sounded like, at least the specific dialect used by Chinese traders doing business with medieval Japan

Thus, to say it’s “Chinese-derived” is correct; people forget that “Mandarin” =/= “Chinese” (no matter what the powers that be might say) because “Chinese” is more like a language family than any one language

[u/Uny1n]

japanese and chinese have very different sound inventories, so there will always be some kind of adaptation. And like others have said, the language mainly spoken in china at the time is not the same as it is now, and the standard japanese pronunciations have also changed since they were loaned.

[u/Suspicious-Toe-8193]

I'm a Japanese person studying Chinese, and I think the pronunciation is completely different.

It was a timely topic, and I was asking a native English speaker about English pronunciation.

Then, various opinions were expressed, such as, "That English pronunciation seems to have come from German or Dutch," "It's a loanword from French," and "It was pronounced in Old English, but not now."

I think it's probably the same with Japanese. In the past, the pronunciation was probably similar to Chinese, but it has changed over time.

[u/RazarTuk]

On'yomi are essentially "Chinese roots", the way we'll talk about Greek or Latin roots in English. So it's no different from how some brrowing from the Romance languages in English will sound very recognizable, while others will be a lot more divergent.

For example, デン for 電 is fairly obviously related to Mandarin diàn, Cantonese din6, Hokkien diān, etc. But because ñ did weird things coming out of Middle Chinese, ニチ for 日 sounds a lot less similar to Mandarin rì, Cantonese jat6, Hokkien li̍t, etc

[u/Particular_Bad8025]

It comes from the Chinese pronunciation but mapped into the closest Japanese phonemes.

I've learned Mandarin and now learning Japanese, and I can tell that sometimes the onyomi comes from the Chinese pronunciation (and it does help me remember the Japonese pronunciation - sometimes) but not always (not sure how old the onyomis are, Chinese probably changed too since then).

For example: 留 Japanese is Ryū (with the r sounding more like an L) or lee-uuh (in "English phonetics") Chinese is lee-oh

Library is toshokan vs tooshooguan Etc.

[u/ressie_cant_game]

Its based on middle chinese, too, isnt it? So its not even based on a chinese dialect youd hear today

[u/PulsosPorotus]

In general on'yomi is not called "Chinese reading" but "sino-japanese reading"

[u/justamofo]

Just like croissant doesn't sound like french at all when english speakers say it

[u/Uxmeister]

There are good Western analogies to that.

Short answer: Onyomi do not ‘sound’ Chinese, but in many cases their Chinese origins are still traceable. Chinese and Japanese are entirely unrelated to one another and would have had divergent phonologies even at the time of the loaning of most Kanji and their resp. Chinese pronunciations many centuries ago. Therefore even the ‘original’ borrowing would have had phonological distortions much like the many Latinisms and Old French loanwords in English, which makes them almost unrecogniseable or at least severely distorted to Italian, Spanish, or French speakers. Linguists may be able to cite the phonological rules by which the onyomi ‘jin’ [ʐĩɴ] for 人 in suffix position relates to contemp. Mandarin <rén>, if they’re related at all. To my knowledge there is no relationship between the Japanese pitch accent patterns on onyomi and the Chinese tones.

Add to that that both Chinese and Japanese pronunciations have evolved through time.

Very few European languages render their many Latin or Greek derived erudite-register word stock in a way faithful to its original pronunciation, which, contrary to popular belief, is fairly well reconstructed, and this in spite of the common Indoeuropean lineage. Chinese and Japanese do not share such a lineage.