"Name"
Translation:名前
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Is it coincidential how close this sounds to the word "name"? I don't think Japanese would use a loanword for a word as basic as "name", and the fact that it's written in kanji makes me think even more that it's a coincidence. Either way, I'm thankful that Japanese has at least one cognate lol
Would you think the sounds close, too? When I was a junior high school student, English teacher (Japanese) said 'you are lucky! at least you can memorize this word 'name' . '（＾∇＾）
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That's exaclty how I felt when I learned this word LOL. PS: the kanji for namae is so cute imo •-•
Kanji is a complicated kind of cute. A cute that you cannot quite define.
exactly! its like calling a little soup spoon cute and people looking at you funny. (its happened to me)
The words are really similar, but it is a coincidence. If it was an american adaptation, should be written in katakana. You can consider Kanji hiragana when translating, because evert kanji can be written in hiragana.
Coincidentally, name is "naam" in Hindi as well. Also the case in Sanskrit IIRC.
I wouldn't say it's entirely coincidental in this case, given that Hindi is a part of Indo-European language family that includes English, among many others.
And in Finnish it's "nimi" (which may or may not be due to Indo-European influence); it's funny how the n-m consonant pattern keeps popping up.
There were languages that preceded or existed alongside the proto-language groups that we know of. So we don't know the entire history of where all of the influences were. But in words like "name" and a few others, we see some possible evidence of interactions between ancient tribes that we don't know about, only suspect, which may have preceded some of the migrations and interactions that we do know about. There is also the case of cultures that were essentially destroyed, etc., who were simply never written about because they preceded writing systems. That's where scholars are tempted to think that, for example, the Vanir were actually a group of real people, and not just some story about some mythological gods.
Japan had a lot of portugese contact in the 1500s and name is dervived from latin...
Isn't 名前 technically "first name" and 名 "name"?
(I understand that in an English context we usually refer to first name as name... but still, my brain likes understanding both natural usage and technical meaning.)
名前is full name, sometimes first name depending on context. 名 is more abstract, artistic, closer to "the concept of a name". Source: spent half an hour obsessing over this haha.
The お at the front of 名前implies respect. Using お as a prefix is usually just being polite.
I have heard people in anime say the word name but instead of 名前 they use 名. Also the movie "your name", the Japanese title is "kimi no na wa". So how many ways there are to say the word name? Is 名前 formal and simple 名 informal?
Cognates are words that have a common etymological origin, so technically these (name and 名前) aren't cognates because Japanese and English are 'completely unrelated' languages, unlike English and Scots/Frisian/Dutch/German/Luxembourgish/Bavarian/Swedish/Danish/Norwegian/Icelandic/Yiddish/Interlingua/Latin/Norman/French/Haitian/Catalan/Spanish/Portuguese/Romanian/Esperanto/Ido/Kurdish/Persian/Mazanderani/Sindhi/Hindi/Urdu/Bengali, which are related and in which the words for 'name' are indeed cognates (that was fun).