90284
At my company we use a kanban in our software development process. I speak
Chinese and I know the word in Chinese as 看板 (kànbǎn in pinyin), 看 meaning
"look" and 板 meaning "board". Google tells me the word/idea is originally from
Japanese, and also romanized like "kanban". I don't know much about Japanese
but I thought usually kanji are different pronunciations than their sister
Chinese characters - is it just a happy accident that the words 看 and 板 mean
the same thing and are pronounced similarly in both Japanese and Chinese?
CC BY-SA 4.0
2021-09-11T14:11:12.690
90281
2021-09-19T05:32:32.953
2021-09-11T15:36:32.217
48127
48127
question
kanji chinese
Is kanban (看板) really the same in Japanese and Chinese?
They just look identical in romanizations. A Japanese person and a Chinese
person might understand each other with their native readings, but the real
pronunciations have non-negligible differences. Chinese pinyin final _n_ is
always [n], where Japanese final _n_ (as the transcription of ん) is called
[moraic nasal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_phonology#Moraic_nasal)
that changes into diverse sounds according to what comes next.

In short, they would respectively sound like:

  * Chinese (Mandarin): _kànbǎn_ [[kʰan˥˩.p(b)an˨˩˦]] (AmE approx. _can-ban_ )
  * Japanese: かんばん _kanban_ [[kʰɐmbɐɴ]] (AmE approx. _come-bun(gh)_ )

As you may know, 看板 is not a Chinese Chinese word, merely a transliteration of
the Japanese word meaning "signboard", in the _kanban_ system context
(ironically, the word is rarely written in kanji in Japanese as for this
specific sense) or anime words like 看板娘.
CC BY-SA 4.0
2021-09-11T15:27:53.840
90284
2021-09-19T05:32:32.953
2021-09-19T05:32:32.953
7810
7810
90281
answer