‘Thank you’ in Various Asian Languages

Sudden revelation! In Chinese, the usual way to say ‘thank you’ is 谢谢 xièxie, though there is also a more formal word 感谢 gǎnxiè, which has roughly the same meaning.

In Vietnamese, ‘thank you’ is ‘Cảm Ơn’, which is pronounced something like ‘gam un’. It sounds curiously like the Chinese word 感恩, which means ‘to be grateful’ (it’s used in the Chinese word for Thanksgiving – 感恩节).

Then it hit me that in Korean, ‘thank you’ is ‘감사합니다’ gamsahamnida – there’s that ‘gan’-like sound again! You may be thinking, ‘oh, but this is gaM, not gaN’, well in Cantonese, 感 is in fact pronounced as ‘gam’. Not a lot of non-Chinese know this, but Cantonese is in fact closer than Mandarin is to the historic Chinese pronunciation, so if (when) languages were influencing each other in Asia’s history, it’s probably the case that 感 was initially pronounced ‘gam’.

Seeing these similarities between these different Asian languages prompted me take a look at some other languages from the continent, but a cursory glance hasn’t revealed any other obvious correlations. The only one close was Thai – ขอบคุณค่ะ Kob Kun Ka [female form of ‘thank you’], where there’s some similar ‘gam/n’-like sounds and I could quite imagine the bilabial nasal ‘m’ becoming a bilabial stop ‘b’ on the end of ‘Kob’. Anyway, something to look out for…