4 ms·
Portuguese loanwords in Japanese are interesting because, unlike other Western word imports, a lot of them have been around long enough, and thoroughly integrat
by Berobero 9y ago
Portuguese loanwords in Japanese are interesting because, unlike other Western word imports, a lot of them have been around long enough, and thoroughly integrated into the culture and writing system, that a number of them are assumed to be Japanese or Sino-Japanese words by most all native speakers.
Tenpura (commonly seen as 天麩羅 or 天婦羅) is one example, but also karuta (a card game, commonly 歌留多 or 加留多) and konpeitō (a confection, commonly 金平糖). The the case of karuta, at least, it feels enough like a regular Japanese word that it undergoes a morphophonological transformation (rendaku e.g. uta-garuta) typically reserved for the native Japanese lexicon (i.e. not Sino-Japanese or other loanwords).
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jpatokal 9y agoKanji are not commonly used for any of those words. However, they are typically rendered in hiragana, which is usually reserved only for native Japanese words. Tabako (タバコ、たばこ、煙草) is another well-entrenched Portuguese loan, with particularly wacky kanji: they mean "smoke grass", which is reasonable enough, but you'd never guess the characters are read "tabako".
- cdavid 9y agoThe writing "天ぷら" is common enough I think. I just got tempura udon a day ago, and the menu was using the kanji.
- Berobero 9y ago> Kanji are not commonly used for any of those words. Forgive me if it seemed as though I was talking about usage ratios; I was merely saying that it's not uncommon to see them written in the kanji stylized form; in the case of konpeito, however, the kanji is by far the most common form (probably because the character semantics fit well). 天 also literally means tempura in a variety of derivative words. But mostly I was just getting at how fundamentally integrated portuguese loanwords are in Japanese in general. shabon-dama (bubbles), kappa (raincoat), kabocha (pumpkin), and other's. Juban (a traditional undergarment) is probably the most surprising.
- rangibaby 9y ago煙草 is ateji which in this case means that the characters are read that way only for that word. The other kind of ateji is when kanji are used like an alphabet eg 亜米利加 (A me ri ka). The second kind is mainly used for abbreviations in modern Japanese eg 米 is equivalent to writing "US" in English.
- ekianjo 9y agothere is castella too. written in katakana though. But then even Coffee has a kanji spellIng and nobody is going to assume its a native japanese word. 珈琲
- cma 9y agoAre arigato and obrigado related? (edit: apparently not, it is mentioned here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_Japanese_words_of_Portuguese_origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_Japanese_words_of_... )