69200
There are many words in French that are spelled identically to or very
similarly to English words but the meanings are not the same. These words are
called faux-amis (false friends) because they trick you into assuming the
meaning and then you discover the meaning is sometimes quite different.

For example:

''rester'' means ''to stay'', not ''to rest''.

''quitter'' means ''to leave'', not ''to quit''.

''monnaie'' means ''loose change'', not ''money''.

''librairie'' means ''bookstore'', not ''library''.

Anyway I have discovered a similar phenomenon between Japanese and Chinese.

''人参'' means carrot in Japanese but Ginseng in Chinese.

''棚'' means shelf in Japanese but shed in Chinese.

''麒麟'' means giraffe in Japanese but it is a kind of mythical creature in
Chinese.

I feel these are kind of faux-amis between the Japanese and Chinese language.

My question is: Why don't the characters used for Japanese Kanji have the same
meaning as those used in Chinese ?
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2019-06-30T14:01:33.623
69191
2019-07-01T03:58:38.757
2019-06-30T19:42:05.673
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question
kanji chinese
Why don't the characters used for Japanese Kanji have the same meaning as those used in Chinese? (Chinese-Japanese false friends)
To borrow a little from an older, [related
answer](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/a/2783/16022):

When the Japanese adopted Chinese characters as kanji, the main goal was to
find characters with sufficiently similar meaning to existing Japanese words.
As a result, there was some natural drift in the meaning from the original
Chinese, along with the occasional mix-up or misinterpretation.

Additionally, this all happened long enough ago that both Chinese _and_
Japanese moved on as languages, mostly independently of each other. So for
some words the Japanese may actually reflect the traditional Chinese meaning
more closely than the modern Chinese (and of course there are many modern
Chinese languages/dialects which don't all ascribe the exact same meaning to
the same characters too).

The kirin/qilin one is particularly interesting, since it seems that giraffes
were brought to China during the Ming dynasty, and they were probably called
qilin then (on the assumption that they _were_ the mystical creature, similar
to how dinosaurs and dragons may have been conflated at some point). For
whatever reason, it was more useful for the Japanese to refer to giraffes than
the magical creature, and so the meaning shifted appropriately (as it did in
Korea).
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-07-01T03:58:38.757
69200
2019-07-01T03:58:38.757
16022
69191
answer