Here's some more influence and then weird connections:
- The Japanese word for bread is "パン" (pronounced 'pan')
- The Korean word is "빵" (pronounced 'ppang')
- Both are loaned from the Portuguese 'pão' (bread).
- In Chinese many kinds of bread are called <something>包 (<something>'bao') or 包<something> ('bao'<something>). Examples: 面包 'Mianbao' (bread) or 包子 'Baozi' (steam bun). Note the 包 'bao' sounds a bit like the Portuguese 'pão'. However, it turns out this is completely unrelated and 包 means something more like "package" (or so all the translators and dictionaries I could find claim) so most people believe that this is a false cognate and not a loanword like in Korean and Japanese.
- Despite this, the Chinese 包 'bao' has ended up in Korean as a kind of loan word as well, but because it seems to mean the same thing as 빵'ppang' and is used in similar ways in Chinese as 빵'ppang' might be used in Korean and for various pronunciation reasons in Korean, Chinese origin breads are also called 빵'ppang'.
- The proper translation for 包 into Korean is more likely 꾸러미 'kkuleomi' (package).
- So....Chinese-Korean breads are often called <something>빵 such as 찐빵 'jjinppang' (steamed bun)) even though the correct Chinese name for the Chinese-Korean 찐빵 in China is called a 馒头 'Mantou'.
- However, in Korean, a 만두 'Mandu' is a different but related food, a dumpling, and in Japanese a 饅頭 'Manjou'.
- Going West instead of East from China, the 'Mandu' as a food goes back a thousand years and spread all over the Silk Road, so local variants are found all over Turky, Persia, Afghanistan, Mongolia and so on are called the same thing and may have been the basis for the famous Russian "Pelmeni" and Polish "Pierogi" and various other dumplings known around the world.
And thus the great bread-dumpling belt is enjoyed around the world to this day and was established by explorers, wanderers, conquerors and traders.
...and a Japanese manju 饅頭 is a fluffy, sweet confection filled with bean paste, close to a Chinese bao but quite unlike the Korean mandu.
Mandu, in turn, comes from various Turkic languages, eg. in Turkish they're manti. But in Mongolia, the savoury meat-filled dumpling everyone else nearby calls a manti/manty/mandu/... is a booz, because they borrowed the word from the Chinese baozi instead, but in Chinese this style of dumpling is now called a jiaozi, which is the source of the Japanese gyoza 餃子, and on it goes...
This hit me really close because a local Afghan place near me started serving 'Mantoo' which turns out to be kind of a meat dumpling which got me thinking about it recently. This post today just fed into it even more.
I have one that you may find interesting. A double parallel I discovered about 12 years ago and so far I haven't heard anyone else mention it.
There is a bird we call `swallow` in English, which has the same name as the action `to swallow`. I looked up these in an etymological dictionary and found that they have distinct, yet similar roots.
The Sino-Japanese word for the bird is 燕(tsubame). The action of swallowing can be written properly as 嚥下 (enge), in the same register as its antonym 嘔吐 (outo).
This reminds me of 設定 (settei) setting, which can be used in terms of configuration, or in terms of setting the scene.
And also sounds a bit like setting.
'pão' descends from the Latin word 'panis', with a 'n'. So it's possible the Korean form reflects the nasalisation that was occurring at the time of contact in the 1500s, while the Japanese doesn't.
Galician and Spanish retain the non-nasal form 'pan'.
I'm pretty sure Korean word 빵 was imported from Japanese way later than 1500s. Most likely during the colonial period (1910--1945) or shortly before that.
As other comments explain, Japanese pan is pronounced not with [n] but with a uvular nasal, which is close to "ng" in English "king", so Japanese word-final "n" is commonly imported to Korean as ㅇ ("ng").
Probably a late import from Tibet. Tibet's north is directly exposed to ethnically Turkic and Mongol areas, thought to be the reason of its distribution (possibly all the way from Instanbul!).
- The Japanese word for bread is "パン" (pronounced 'pan')
- The Korean word is "빵" (pronounced 'ppang')
- Both are loaned from the Portuguese 'pão' (bread).
- In Chinese many kinds of bread are called <something>包 (<something>'bao') or 包<something> ('bao'<something>). Examples: 面包 'Mianbao' (bread) or 包子 'Baozi' (steam bun). Note the 包 'bao' sounds a bit like the Portuguese 'pão'. However, it turns out this is completely unrelated and 包 means something more like "package" (or so all the translators and dictionaries I could find claim) so most people believe that this is a false cognate and not a loanword like in Korean and Japanese.
- Despite this, the Chinese 包 'bao' has ended up in Korean as a kind of loan word as well, but because it seems to mean the same thing as 빵'ppang' and is used in similar ways in Chinese as 빵'ppang' might be used in Korean and for various pronunciation reasons in Korean, Chinese origin breads are also called 빵'ppang'.
- The proper translation for 包 into Korean is more likely 꾸러미 'kkuleomi' (package).
- So....Chinese-Korean breads are often called <something>빵 such as 찐빵 'jjinppang' (steamed bun)) even though the correct Chinese name for the Chinese-Korean 찐빵 in China is called a 馒头 'Mantou'.
- However, in Korean, a 만두 'Mandu' is a different but related food, a dumpling, and in Japanese a 饅頭 'Manjou'.
- Going West instead of East from China, the 'Mandu' as a food goes back a thousand years and spread all over the Silk Road, so local variants are found all over Turky, Persia, Afghanistan, Mongolia and so on are called the same thing and may have been the basis for the famous Russian "Pelmeni" and Polish "Pierogi" and various other dumplings known around the world.
And thus the great bread-dumpling belt is enjoyed around the world to this day and was established by explorers, wanderers, conquerors and traders.