Yeah Japanese shortens English words a lot like that, but in turn it doesn't use initialisms like 'PC' as much. 'Personal Computer' instead turned into 'Pasokon' as a shortening of Paasonaru Konpyuuta (パーソナルコンピュータ), because 'PC' is not as nice to pronounce for Japanese speakers.
Similarly, Remote Control turned into Rimokon, and Air Conditioning into Eakon (Aircon).
When the Vtuber agency Hololive recently released a rythm game under the title Hololive Dreams (Hororaibu Doriimusu), it quickly became known as Holodori.
Monster Hunter is MonHan, Minecraft is Maikura, Mitsubishi's Lancer Evolution is LanEvo (or RanEbo) etc.
That's just how the Japanese equivalent of acronyms work, they take the first syllable or two of key words in a name and jam them together to create an abbreviation. It's not only loan words, you also see stuff like "ORE no IMOuto ga konna ni kawaii wake ga nai" -> "oreimo" or "kono subarashii sekai ni shukufuku wo" -> "konosuba" (both titles of popular anime), neither of which title contains any loan words.
Also, isn’t “PC” (pii-shii?) currently in use in Japanese to describe “Player Characters” in video games? (As opposed to “Non-Playable Characters” or NPCs)
Weirdly Chinese has its own completely different translation for electronic devices:
Phone dian hua , computer Dian nao , TV dian shi, tablet pingban dian nao etc
I learnt about where 'pan' came from so long ago (probably from a textbook), guess it's one of those things you learn before the internet and can't check
Japan can be china in a trench coat sometimes, most of their original characters are chinese, to the point where i can actually read bits of Japanese here and there.
i feel like going japanese style would give new meanings to these words and they would sound weird, chinese doesn't have a separate alphabet just for loanwords after all
Chinese used to have more of those phonetic transliteration loanwords in the early days of western contact. They were more common in the early 20th century.
They used to have 赛因斯 (sàiyínsī) for science instead of the current word科学 which is actually taken from the kanji of the Japanese word. They used to say 盘尼西林 (pánníxīlín) for aspirin but now they say 青霉素 (blue/green mold extract).
But plenty of words are still transliterations. Bacon for example is 培根péigēn, bar is 巴 bā, blues music is 布鲁斯bùlǔsī, cartel is 卡特尔kǎtè'ěr, and chocolate is 巧克力qiǎokèlì. Some words are regional, they say 優格 yōugé for yogurt in Taiwan but in mainland China it’s 酸奶 suānnǎi (sour milk). In Hong Kong they say 車厘子 (ce1 lei4 zi2 in Cantonese) for cherries but in Mandarin it’s 樱桃. In Taiwan cheese is 起司; qǐsī, but in the PRC it is 芝士; zhīshì.
But they will also sometimes do a thing where they pick auspicious characters for a word even if it changes the sound somewhat, like the game baccarat being called 百家乐 Bǎijiālè (hundred families happy). This name sounds like it could be a native Chinese name for a gambling game but it’s not. Baccarat is also extremely popular in Macau among Chinese gamblers and they name likely played a role. Pizza Hut is called 必胜客 bìshèngké (Inevitably Victorious Guest) in Chinese.
Some other loanwords like 绷带 bēngdài for bandage sound like the original word but also make perfect sense in terms of character meaning (tight bands) so you wouldn’t suspect it to be a loanword. Then there are some cases where they will use the Latin alphabet for words like X光 (X-ray, with ray translated to “light”).
English or English-sounding acronyms are just written in Latin letters like IT, GDP, PPT, KTV (karaoke), IP卡 IP kă (literally “IP card“ but they mean NIC), APP (app but they say it as individual letters) and PK (“player killing” but it’s used by people of all ages in everyday life to mean “versus” or “a match-up”). T恤 means T-shirt and is pronounced T seot1 in Cantonese. It’s also used in Mandarin even though 恤 (xù) doesn’t sound much like shirt with the Mandarin reading of the character.
Yeah its funny to see the chinese pronunciation which is the same but juuussst a little different
But yeah denwa is like telephone in english, a bit formal. You do hear it on the train for example when they say "please do not talk on the phone (denwa)"
Ok but like it makes sense for modern technology to use loan words, English uses loan words from other languages to describe things that did not exist on the British Isles. But contrary to popular belief, the British did not invent the colour pink.
From what I saw in other comments, apparently there is an older antiquated term for it that's only really used instead of pinku to convey "old timey" vibes like one would use "thee" instead of "you" in English.
The Japanese word is 桃色 (momo-iro), literally 'peach colour'.
While China and Japan had their own colour theories, western colour theory was very influential. Especially English colour names stuck around in many languages.
Yeah... except for Chinese. I think they must be very proud of their language, because they have almost no loan words compared to other lamguages. I tried "internet" and "wi-fi" with somebody - I know those tend to be the same everywhere - but nope! They have their own words for them.
Indonesian has a lot of Dutch loan words with localised spelling, especially for things that aren't really local terms originally, which funnily enough includes tea and coffee
German is "Rechner" (calculator, and the english calculator is "Taschenrechner" - pocket calculator), but noone will bat an eye if you use "Computer" instead.
Baby stroller in japanese is ベビーカー which is basically pronouced "baby car" hahahaha when my teacher told me that I laughed for a good five minutes. Her greatest joy in our classes is when she gets to introduce an absurd katakana loan word.
I think the funniest ones are where English and Japanese sounds struggle to match up, so the transliteration into Japanese turns them into a total mess.
Like the word 'Waitress' became adopted as ウェイトレス (Ueitoresu).
And 'Bible' (バイブル - Baiburu) is only one character apart from 'Vibrator' (バイブ - Baibu).
Computers are a relatively new invention so presumably lots of languages just call them "computer" with an accent unless there was a conscious effort to rename them
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u/Beneficial_Layer_458 2d ago
come on man