Asian = Oriental, etc.

[Benjamin Barrett]

> Behalf Of Douglas G. Wilson
> Sent: Sunday, February 25, 2001 2:41 PM

>  From Benjamin Barrett:

> >In correspondence with China, the characters
> >"sun origin" were used [as in Chinese], but the Japanese
> pronounced them as
> >"Yamato." Somewhere along the way, the Yamato pronunciation got set aside
> >and the (pseudo) Chinese readings of Nihon/Nippon came into currency.
>
> As I stated in my earlier message, I don't doubt that "Nippon" =
> "sun-origin" was first used by the 7th Century AD. It is usually said,
> however, that it was invented by Japanese, not Chinese, and therefore I
> wonder whether it really referred to the sunrise.

I see. I'd never heard people say they thought the word was invented by the
Japanese.

> As for why the Japanese wanted to use a new name in their relations with
> China ...

It was not a new name. This must have been writing in Chinese because no
writing system adapted for Japanese people existed yet. Even when writing a
document for Japanese people, the Japanese wrote in Chinese.

When the dictionary entry says the Japanese pronounced the characters as
"Yamato," this refers to an horribly complex reading process of reading
Chinese writing as Japanese. So the Japanese wrote the characters for Yamato
which the Chinese pronounced in their own way. Eventually, the Japanese made
a shift from the native pronunciation of Yamato to their rendition of the
Chinese pronunciation, i.e., Nihon/Nippon. (I think I've read that Nippon
was a later development, but I'm not sure...)

Benjamin Barrett