こんにちは！
Recently, I was scanning a chapter written by three individuals, two of whom I know as Japanese instructors at my university. Here is a link to the pdf. While scanning it, I stumbled upon a line that really caught my attention.
"For example, teacher in English is represented as 先生 in both
Chinese and Japanese (logography) and せんせい sensee in Japanese kana." (Tomizawa, et al, 2013. Look for MultiTasks, MultiSkills, MultiConnections 2013)
Interestingly enough, I had suspected this connection. Because of language diffusion--the sharing of words between languages and cultures--these similar words exist. Korean also has the word, 선생 (seonsaeng). However, as Japanese and Korean both adopted this form as their term for "teacher", something else was occurring: semantic shift.
Semantic shift is when a change in word meaning occurs. In modern Chinese, 先生, (xian-sheng) [lit. before-born] has become an honorific for "Sir/Mister". It is used to address older males. In Chinese, teachers are now referred to as 老师, (lao-shi) [lit. old-master].
These linguistic connections will definitely come up again in this blog, but this one has interested me for a long time. I hope to go more in-depth in the future as to why and how.
But until that day, さよなら！
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