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Loanwords have entered written and spoken Chinese from many sources, including ancient peoples whose descendants now speak Chinese. In addition to phonetic differences, varieties of Chinese such as Cantonese and Shanghainese often have distinct words and phrases left from their original languages which they continue to use in daily life and sometimes even in Mandarin.
Words of Chinese origin have entered European languages, including English. Most of these were direct loanwords from various varieties of Chinese.However, Chinese words have also entered indirectly via other languages, particularly Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese, that have all used Chinese characters at some point and contain a large number of Chinese loanwords.
More remotely, cognate terms from different languages can be borrowed, such as sauce (Old French) and salsa (Spanish), both ultimately from Latin, or tea (Dutch thee) and chai (Hindi), both ultimately from Chinese. This last pair reflects the history of how tea has entered English via different trade routes.
Using such a method, English was evaluated to have a lexical similarity of 60% with German and 27% with French. Lexical similarity can be used to evaluate the degree of genetic relationship between two languages. Percentages higher than 85% usually indicate that the two languages being compared are likely to be related dialects.
"Zì" (字) is the first Chinese character created, and Cangjie related it to a mythical story of the day these characters were created [clarification needed]. Japanese kanji borrows some words from the Chinese language. These form the relationship between the Japanese kanji and the Chinese logograph. Chinese words and characters were ...
In comparative linguistics, Meillet's principle (/ m eɪ. ˈ j eɪ z / may-YAYZ), also known as the three-witness principle or three-language principle, states that apparent cognates must be attested in at least three different, non-contiguous daughter languages in order to be used in linguistic reconstruction.
Derivative cognates (转注; 轉注; zhuǎnzhù; 'reciprocal meaning') are the smallest category, and also the least understood. [44] They are often omitted from modern systems. Xu gave the example of 考 kǎo 'to verify' with 老 lǎo 'old', which had similar Old Chinese pronunciations of * khuʔ and * C-ruʔ [e] respectively. [45]
Cognates also do not need to look or sound similar: English father, French père, and Armenian հայր (hayr) all descend directly from Proto-Indo-European *ph₂tḗr. An extreme case is Armenian երկու (erku) and English two, which descend from Proto-Indo-European *dwóh₁; the sound change *dw > erk in Armenian is regular.