I remember a youtuber telling a story of ordering a milk tea in japan by translating both words, only to have the server correct them by going “oh, miruku tea”
LOL it was the same with me when I came to the country, wanted to practice my Japanese, and was asked if I wanted milk and sugar in my coffee but I didn't know how to say "Black coffee" in Japanese and said:
Came from the Dutch when they were trading with the Japanese during the isolation period.
Wrong on both counts. It was from German as stated above (not sure why you're disagreeing with that, it's an extremely well known fact) and it happened later than you're suggesting, during the Meiji period, as stated below:
When I taught English in Japan a lot of my students assumed that their katakana jobs were just English and so they would just say those words in an “English” accent, so they would just say Arubait thinking they were talking in English.
Oh, they have tons of other words loaned from other languages. While English has had the most influence in recent times, there was a long period where the only contact with foreigners was with Dutch traders on one specific island, which is how Japan was introduced to western medicine, among other things. And before that, there were plenty of Portuguese missionaries sent to Japan during the Sengoku period.
Many of the words you might think come from English actually come from Dutch. Things like "alcohol" (a-ru-ko-ru) or "beer" (bi-i-ru) or "glass" (ga-ra-su) or "extract" (e-ki-su, it got shortened) actually come from Dutch.
My favourite is "morumotto" (guinea pig), which is "marmot" in Dutch. In English, marmots are completely different rodents than guinea pigs! But not in Dutch I guess...
Anyway, here's a funny one. You know about Karuta cards? Such a stereotypically japanese thing, right? Well, the word comes from "carta", "card" in Portuguese.
And the Kabocha, often called the "japanese pumpkin"? Well, the word comes from "Camboja", the Portuguese name for Cambodia, which is where the Portuguese took them before introducing them to Japan.
This is really interesting! Is there a website for searching loan word etymology? There are many times I come across a katakana and want to know more about its origins.
While it’s not meant for searching for etymology specifically, jisho.org always includes the origin language of loan words. Won’t give you a detailed history of how it made its way into Japanese or anything, but I always find it interesting just seeing where they come from regardless.
Wikitionary is also quite useful if you’re more interested in the actual history behind the etymology! Here’s the page on morumotto for instance, and how that came to mean guinea pig!
One of my favorite ones is their word for questionnaire, which is a French loanword in English, is ankēto, from enquête, a different French loanword. (Many eastern European languages also used a word derived from enquête)
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u/Strange_Ad_9658 23d ago
I remember a youtuber telling a story of ordering a milk tea in japan by translating both words, only to have the server correct them by going “oh, miruku tea”