7 ms·

Wait, the Japanese didn't just transliterate everything? I remember talking with a friend who was learning Japanese and a lot of the words were taken straight f

by zhemao 13y ago

Wait, the Japanese didn't just transliterate everything? I remember talking with a friend who was learning Japanese and a lot of the words were taken straight from English, like "antena" or "furaipan" (frying pan).

jpatokal 13y ago
In modern (broadly speaking, postwar) Japanese, yes. However, during the Meiji era vast numbers of neologisms were minted from Chinese roots, and funnily enough, quite a few of them were imported straight back into Chinese! These include some amazingly common words like 文化 "culture", 革命 "revolution", 歴史 "history", etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Japanese_vocabulary#Words_.27made_in_Japan.27 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Japanese_vocabulary#Words_...
- zhemao 13y ago
  Fascinating. Do you know why Japanese moved towards using words transliterated from English in the postwar period? Was it a consequence of the American occupation?
  - dnautics 13y ago
    Probably because America became a worldwide technological (and cultural) force. In Japanese, importing from the Europeans began in the 16th century, from the Portugese (Tabaco, Pan). It's much easier to import loanwords into a language that already has a tradition of bringing words into the language (wholesale, in the case of chinese->japanese) than one that is used to sandbagging the language against outside influence. Witness the difference between French and English (to the extreme case of French-Canadian, where they even made Arret signs, even though Stop is a perfectly good French imperative, and stop signs in france say "stop").
  - patio11 13y ago
    The American occupation is not the primary cause of E->J or J->E linguistic flow. There exist many transliterated words from English and other languages in the pre-war era (e.g. albrech, from German for "work", became arubaito, for part-time job). There are large numbers of English-origin words or coinages dating to before, during, and after the war, with measurable acceleration after the Period of Rapid Economic Growth. Incidentally, my tiptoe-around-this-when-in-Japan-because-it-incenses-nationalists opinion as a linguist is that modern Japanese incorporates by reference large portions of English. "Happy" is, for example, a word in modern Japanese. Not the transliteration -- though that is a word, too -- but "happy", itself, written exactly like that. "Happy" is comprehensible to substantially all speakers of the language and appears in many document corpora so frequently that it cannot be excluded from the Japanese language by any rational criterion. There's another few thousand words which superficially resemble English in modern Japanese. (There are also, of course, minimally a few dozen Japanese loanwords in English.)
    - mithaler 13y ago
      Do you mean "arbeit"? http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Arbeit http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Arbeit
    - jpatokal 13y ago
      Cause, no, but definitely the turning point in the tide. Before and during the nationalist fervor of the war, there was a bit of a movement to purge Japanese of foreign loans (敵性語 "enemy language"), similar to sauerkraut turning into "liberty cabbage" etc in the US. Once the war ended, this was swiftly reversed and the floodgates to importing foreign terminology wholesale (re)opened. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/敵性語 https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/敵性語
      - rmc 13y ago
        Freedom Fries!
      - stevendaniels 13y ago
        That's kind of funny, would they have removed all of the readings borrowed from China? What would Japanese sound like without any borrowings? Historically, the Japanese people have been very willing to borrow words from other languages.
        jpatokal 13y ago
        China wasn't an "enemy", the Japanese had already conquered large swathes of it. The US and Britain were. And yes, you can write "pure" yamatokotoba if you try hard enough (see eg. Shinto prayers), but the end result is as contrived as trying to write English without Latin, Greek or French loans.
        rmc 13y ago
        Uncleftish Beholding (1989) is a short text written by Poul Anderson. It is written using almost exclusively words of Germanic origin, and was intended to illustrate what the English language might look like if it had not received its considerable number of loanwords from other languages, particularly Latin, Greek and French. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding

by zhemao 13y ago

jpatokal 13y ago

In modern (broadly speaking, postwar) Japanese, yes. However, during the Meiji era vast numbers of neologisms were minted from Chinese roots, and funnily enough, quite a few of them were imported straight back into Chinese! These include some amazingly common words like 文化 "culture", 革命 "revolution", 歴史 "history", etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Japanese_vocabulary#Words_.27made_in_Japan.27 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Japanese_vocabulary#Words_...

zhemao 13y ago
Fascinating. Do you know why Japanese moved towards using words transliterated from English in the postwar period? Was it a consequence of the American occupation?
- dnautics 13y ago
  Probably because America became a worldwide technological (and cultural) force. In Japanese, importing from the Europeans began in the 16th century, from the Portugese (Tabaco, Pan). It's much easier to import loanwords into a language that already has a tradition of bringing words into the language (wholesale, in the case of chinese->japanese) than one that is used to sandbagging the language against outside influence. Witness the difference between French and English (to the extreme case of French-Canadian, where they even made Arret signs, even though Stop is a perfectly good French imperative, and stop signs in france say "stop").
- patio11 13y ago
  The American occupation is not the primary cause of E->J or J->E linguistic flow. There exist many transliterated words from English and other languages in the pre-war era (e.g. albrech, from German for "work", became arubaito, for part-time job). There are large numbers of English-origin words or coinages dating to before, during, and after the war, with measurable acceleration after the Period of Rapid Economic Growth. Incidentally, my tiptoe-around-this-when-in-Japan-because-it-incenses-nationalists opinion as a linguist is that modern Japanese incorporates by reference large portions of English. "Happy" is, for example, a word in modern Japanese. Not the transliteration -- though that is a word, too -- but "happy", itself, written exactly like that. "Happy" is comprehensible to substantially all speakers of the language and appears in many document corpora so frequently that it cannot be excluded from the Japanese language by any rational criterion. There's another few thousand words which superficially resemble English in modern Japanese. (There are also, of course, minimally a few dozen Japanese loanwords in English.)
  - mithaler 13y ago
    Do you mean "arbeit"? http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Arbeit http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Arbeit
  - jpatokal 13y ago
    Cause, no, but definitely the turning point in the tide. Before and during the nationalist fervor of the war, there was a bit of a movement to purge Japanese of foreign loans (敵性語 "enemy language"), similar to sauerkraut turning into "liberty cabbage" etc in the US. Once the war ended, this was swiftly reversed and the floodgates to importing foreign terminology wholesale (re)opened. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/敵性語 https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/敵性語
    - rmc 13y ago
      Freedom Fries!
    - stevendaniels 13y ago
      That's kind of funny, would they have removed all of the readings borrowed from China? What would Japanese sound like without any borrowings? Historically, the Japanese people have been very willing to borrow words from other languages.
      - jpatokal 13y ago
        China wasn't an "enemy", the Japanese had already conquered large swathes of it. The US and Britain were. And yes, you can write "pure" yamatokotoba if you try hard enough (see eg. Shinto prayers), but the end result is as contrived as trying to write English without Latin, Greek or French loans.
        rmc 13y ago
        Uncleftish Beholding (1989) is a short text written by Poul Anderson. It is written using almost exclusively words of Germanic origin, and was intended to illustrate what the English language might look like if it had not received its considerable number of loanwords from other languages, particularly Latin, Greek and French. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding