こんにちは皆さん! So I know a bit of Russian and always felt it had some distant similarities to Chinese and Japanese. Very loosely obviously and just an intuition. The word in Russian for life if jizn, and the japanese word for nature is 自然 shizen. Is there a website in English that I can learn the etymology of japanese words? I found one that’s all in Japanese and it’s a bit difficult for me to understand everything.
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English Wiktionary is pretty good if you want information on a wide variety of languages, although it’s often lacking for Japanese (you can often look at the Chinese section for words of Chinese origin though)
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> The word in Russian for life if jizn, and the japanese word for nature is 自然 shizen
Completely unrelated, to quote Wiktionary:
> Inherited from Old East Slavic жизнь (žiznĭ), from Proto-Slavic *žiznь. Synchronically analyzable as жить (žitʹ) + -знь (-znʹ). Cognates include Old Church Slavonic жизнь (žiznĭ), Old Polish żyźń.
vs
> /*ɦljids njen/ (Old Chinese) → /d͡ziɪH ȵiᴇn/ (Middle/Classical Chinese) → /sizen/ (what I think it would have been when it was loaned into Japanese) → /ɕizen/