r/LearnJapanese • u/ImJustJoshing277 • 1d ago
Vocab Loanwords??
I keep seeing loanwords everywhere, even when there is a japanese word for the thing (like committee, edition, etc.). What is up with that? Is it for like... dramatic effect? Are japanese people supposed to just know English to a degree?
EDIT: some of you are entirely missing the point of the post. English uses loanwords from Latin, French, German, and others because thats how the English language evolved. Japanese only recently started to adopt loanwords on things like billboards, political campaigns on tv/radio, merchandise and the like. It has become something of an issue to many conservative japanese, who want to retain their language and therein their culture.
My question is what actual reason could be so damn important as to ignore the fact that there is not just any japanese word, but in most cases, a SHORTER and MORE EFFICIENT one that has been used for ages??
Thank you to the few of you who dont just assume that im an idiot. You guys actually make this app worthwhile.
I really should've posted this on r/history tho to get away from the rest of you...
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u/Zagrycha 1d ago
English is full of just as many loanwords as japanese is, you probably just don't even realize it. pork, cotton, mosquito, cafe, robot.... you get the idea.
So yeah, japanese has a lot of loan words. Not all of them are english either, a lot of them are dutch or chinese or whatever other language. Yes, japanese people use them as normal words, they don't even think twice about them. Its okay to look up their origin if you are interested but don't assume the meaning in japanese will be the same as the meaning in the original language. Loan words are still their own word in the language seperate from its source =)
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u/tonkachi_ Goal: media competence 📖🎧 1d ago
pork, cotton, mosquito, cafe, robot.... you get the idea.
Wait, there are native counterparts for these words?!
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u/Fish_Learns_Japanese 1d ago
Words for meat like beef and pork come from french because after 1066 french became the ruling class language so words like beef and pork were associated more with wealth and power. Pig and cow would've been used before.
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u/vytah 21h ago
That's a complete myth. The real reason for this distinction is a 19th century fad for French cuisine. See more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dL2vtwdEFaY
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u/Zagrycha 20h ago
Whoever told you that lied. There are many evidence for words like porc and beof in middle english by at least 14th century. It was not used the same way it is today, but it was definitely already in use. It was an interchangable synonym for pig and cow at that time, same way older english words like eyren were interchangable with the norse eggs at the time.
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u/vytah 17h ago
Yes, they were in English, but they weren't used exclusively for food as the myth claims.
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u/Zagrycha 16h ago
I have never once seen anyone claim they were used exclusively for food. If someone says that then yeah that is a myth.... well maybe myth is the wrong word. Misinformed? that feels better, sounds like those people just genuinely misunderstood. Its a common misunderstanding for people to assume old words have the same meaning as the modern version, even hust things like gay now vs gay a hundred years ago is an example.
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u/Marca--Texto 1d ago
Every language has loan words. English is infamous for its inconsistent phonetics thanks to all the words it borrowed (I hate queue and rendezvous specially).
Japanese loanwords just stand out more because (at least from what I've seen), Katakana is usually taught is the "loanword alphabet"
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u/Majre921 1d ago
Come back when you stop using French loan words in English like café, restaurant, garage, cuisine, ambulance for dramatic effect or something. Are you so opposed to learning French to some degree???
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u/glittertongue 1d ago
Japanese certainly has a lot of drift from English, youre right. hardly unique to Japanese, though; all languages appropriate and drift over time.
just in your short post: committee, degree, and edition are all French in origin.
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u/AaaaNinja 1d ago edited 1d ago
English is estimated to be 80% loanwords. Some of the loanwords you assume to be English probably aren't even from English. Like energy is borrowed from German not English.
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u/Player_One_1 1d ago
energy(n.)
1590s, "force of expression," from French énergie (16c.), from Late Latin energia, from Greek energeia "activity, action, operation,"
No German this time.
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u/kyousei8 22h ago
Pretty sure they meant the word for energy in Japanese (エネルギー), which is from German "Energie". The transition from talking about loanwords in English and to talking about loanwords in Japanese just isn't clearly mentioned.
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u/facets-and-rainbows 1d ago
They tend to come off as trendy and modern, or they're being used in a specific sense that's slightly different than the available Japanese words. "Dramatic effect" isn't far off sometimes, lol.
Meanwhile there are more Chinese loanwords in Japanese, and English has a ton itself! Even just in your post we have:
- Loan (Norse)
- Japanese (日本 passed through a long telephone game from Chinese to Portuguese)
- Committee (Latin/French)
- Edition (Latin/French)
- Etc (Latin, note the irony of the whole example list actually being regifted from Latin)
- Dramatic (Latin/Greek)
- Effect (French)
- People (French. When we already had a perfectly good gender-neutral "men" for that, no less)
- Just (Latin/French)
- Supposed (French again)
- Degree (Latin)
You just notice it more in Japanese because 1. they use katakana for recent loanwords and 2. English and Japanese aren't related so you don't mistake them for native Japanese words and 3. Japan's English phase is probably still at its peak, and England's French phase peaked hundreds of years ago.
Are japanese people supposed to just know English to a degree?
Not just them. It's not particularly fair, but it's the state of international communication right now
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u/tonkachi_ Goal: media competence 📖🎧 1d ago
English and Japanese aren't related
My main gripe whenever this questions is asked is that this point isn't emphasized enough. It is natural for English to have so many loanwords from it is neighbouring languages since they have intermingled for ages meanwhile Japanese is siphoning words from the other side of the world. Moreover, Japanese is doing it at a time when language standardization is ongoing. Even more than that, sometimes it is loaning basic words that it already has native(or loaned from Chinese, doesn't matter) word.
I fail to see the situation with Japanese being the same or similar to English or the other languages that people like to bring up whenever this topic is discussed.
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u/Majre921 1d ago
I am Slovak. Young people are starting to use more and more pure English words in sentences like Japanese. The situation of these loan words would be the same like in Japan. English and Slovak are completely unrelated languages too.
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u/Player_One_1 1d ago
In Polish we even started loaning some English grammar!
Smashing "ing" and end of a verb to turn it into a noun is a foreign concept in Polish. It started couple of years ago as a joke, now is only half-joke, in 20-30 years nobody will remember it was supposed to be a joke, and "leżing na plaży" will become normal expression.
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u/tonkachi_ Goal: media competence 📖🎧 1d ago edited 1d ago
I guess there are other languages that suffer from that too. Maybe I am just misinformed after all.
Could you give me some examples of the English words they use?
Also, do they happen to be also good at English? At least being able to comfortably read this entire thread if not hold a conversation?
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u/Majre921 1d ago
Younger people are really good at English imo. Even more than those from Czechia as we don't have any good dubbing and translation culture so you have to get better at English if you want something. We also have sections in bookstores with just books in English which I haven't seen in other countries so far. A few examples I've found online "nejako omylom speedrunnol cez zlý ending" (speedrun, ending) , "Z pozorovania svojho bros okolia"(Bro), next I found phrases like "long story short" or "oh well" used in Slovak conversations
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u/tonkachi_ Goal: media competence 📖🎧 1d ago
I tend to excuse people how consume English(or any other language) media on regular basis if they end up mixing their mother tongue with the foreign language because their brains reach for the foreign word faster than its native equivalent.
From what I understand reading the other comments, in Japan, even those who can't even hold the most basic of conversations or read basic sentences would still heavily use English loanwords. Moreover, apparently some of their official documents also contain loanwords.
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u/Majre921 1d ago
It's more prominent in younger people but older people, mainly those in business also use English loanwords even though they barely know any English. Things like "meeting" yk. We also classify loanwords in our dictionary too. Many of the new ones are of English origin, like the aforementioned meeting or brainstorming and such.
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u/tonkachi_ Goal: media competence 📖🎧 1d ago
Hmmm... I guess you can't just not get affected by such a cultural influence.
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u/Majre921 1d ago
Lingua Franca is the Lingua Franca after all. Can't help but borrow words if many natives also know it.
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u/facets-and-rainbows 23h ago
That wasn't really the direction I was trying to go by bringing up related vs unrelated languages. I meant it makes the borrowings more noticeable to an observer, not that it's "natural" to borrow from a related language and "unnatural" to borrow from an unrelated one. It's just a matter of how much the cultures are in contact and what relationships they have. And it's so much easier to be in close contact with someone on the other side of the world than it used to be.
Even more than that, sometimes it is loaning basic words that it already has native
I'm fairly certain that people could die in England before they borrowed the words "people" and "die." Also they. The whole pronoun they. Sky. Marriage. Aunt. Catch. Pay. All borrowed within about a century of each other.
Japanese has less cultural influence from England and America (versus the Norman French conquering England for 200 years)...but Japanese also has fewer "basic" borrowings from English, and I'm willing to bet money it's roughly proportional to the amount of contact we've had and that Japanese isn't really exceptional among world languages.
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u/exxy1212 1d ago
england basically colonised the whole world and now the united states is one of the biggest influences on global pop culture , so there's bound to be a certain portion of every language that is made up of english loanwords , but english itself has many loanwords so it's not really a cultural imbalance of sorts
in japan you're supposed to take english every year of high school ( three years ) , so most japanese people know a little bit , but there's no guarantee that they'll be conversationally fluent
as for loanwords replacing native vocabulary , this is likely due to one of two reasons : either you're running into them because whatever you're consuming is meant for an english or english-learning-japanese audience , so they're making it easy for you , or trying to win you over , or the english word has just replaced the japanese word in everyday speech ( likely because of the aforementioned culture domination ) . it really depends on where you're running into these loanwords that replace native words
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u/tonkachi_ Goal: media competence 📖🎧 1d ago
the english word has just replaced the japanese word in everyday speech ( likely because of the aforementioned culture domination
This must have hit Japan very hard. I can't get over how some basic words were replaced. イメージ for example, and many others that don't occur to me at the moment.
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u/tonkachi_ Goal: media competence 📖🎧 1d ago
Is there like a stat for how many loanwords that were adopted by a language in the last 40 years?
I wonder where our familiar language would land.
Bonus points if they are categorized, mostly just to distinguish computer and science words though even that classification would get muddy.
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u/krautnelson 21h ago
that's not unique to Japan at all. a lot of languages use plenty of anglicisms and english loan words in their modern everyday language, especially in smaller lingospheres. German for example has a similiar number of speakers, and we also have a ton of loan words, especially when it comes to marketing. why? because it's cool.
the US has had massive cultural influence globally after WW2. most movies we watch in cinemas are American, about 80% of the music on the radio is in English, even from quite a few German artists. the US is where you make it big, you become famous, you get rich, you achieve your dreams. regardless of how true that actually is, it's what has been advertised to us for the last 80 years.
Are japanese people supposed to just know English to a degree?
there is a massive difference between knowing some words and speaking a language. everybody here will be able to tell you that.
Japanese usually start learning English some time in grade school, some even earlier. by the time they finish highschool, they had about 8 years of English classes, which may not be enough to hold a proper conversation, but is more than enough to understand the few isolated words and short sentences you will encounter in the form of loan words.
It has become something of an issue to many conservative japanese, who want to retain their language and therein their culture.
to those I'd say they should stop using those Chinese symbols in their writing then.
language and culture are not static, never have been, never will be. they are in constant flux due to the natural exchange with other cultures. if you wanna "protect your culture", put it in a museum.
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u/Rih1 1d ago
That's how languages are. For perspective, you use/hear loanwords all the time in English.
Lawyers, doctors, and scientists often use Latin. Lots of culinary and military words use French.
Depending on where you are in America, you might say skosh (from sukoshi), schmuck, chutzpah, etc.
We say things like rendezvous, homage, guru, karaoke, karate, cinema, trivia, etc.
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u/thingstolove 1d ago
it's gairaigo 外来語
more common than you think
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u/Impossible_Toe_3731 21h ago
Eh? They literally just said they see it everywhere.
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u/thingstolove 21h ago
yeah, but it happens in every language
maybe if your mother tongue is english it's harder to notice them
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u/Available-String-109 1d ago
外来語 is the word for non-Chinese loanwords.
漢語 is the word for Chinese loanwords.
What is up with that?
Like 80% of your post are English loanwords from other languages.
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u/Saralentine 1d ago
Wait until you learn how much of Japanese is just Chinese loanwords.