English Loanwords in Japanese
Most languages in the world have Loanwords, or words that are taken from other languages. A few examples in English would be: honcho (Japanese), rendezvous (French), and Karma (Hindi). Japanese also has loanwords from many other languages.
In Japanese, loanwords are interesting because they are almost always written using the writing system called Katakana. Japanese uses 3 different writing systems, Kanji (Chinese characters), Hiragana (A phonetic alphabet), and Katakana (A phonetic alphabet used for loanwords, scientific terms, onomatopoeia, and in a function similar to italics). Most loanwords in Japanese are taken from English, some common words are: sports, cake, T-shirt, and news.
Japanese is a syllabic language, meaning that all the sounds in the language are syllables. Japanese is primarily a consonant-vowel language, meaning that the sounds all consist of a consonant and then a vowel. There is only one exception to this in the Japanese language and that is the ん (it sounds like an English "n" or "m" depending on the situation). Due to this, whenever the Japanese language takes a loanword it can be heavily distorted, see this comparison:
*World is not as commonly used as the Japanese word for world: 世界.
In Japanese, loanwords are interesting because they are almost always written using the writing system called Katakana. Japanese uses 3 different writing systems, Kanji (Chinese characters), Hiragana (A phonetic alphabet), and Katakana (A phonetic alphabet used for loanwords, scientific terms, onomatopoeia, and in a function similar to italics). Most loanwords in Japanese are taken from English, some common words are: sports, cake, T-shirt, and news.
Japanese is a syllabic language, meaning that all the sounds in the language are syllables. Japanese is primarily a consonant-vowel language, meaning that the sounds all consist of a consonant and then a vowel. There is only one exception to this in the Japanese language and that is the ん (it sounds like an English "n" or "m" depending on the situation). Due to this, whenever the Japanese language takes a loanword it can be heavily distorted, see this comparison:
Another reason why an English word could be distorted when translated into Japanese is that Japanese does not have an "R" or an "L" sound. You might be thinking "woah woah woah you used an "R" up there when you showed the pronunciation of world," and you would be correct; however, in Japanese they do not have the same sound that we use for "R" and "L." To an English speaker the sound usually sounds like a mix between an L and an R, they make the sound in a similar way to our "R" sound. If you'd like to try to make the sound practice making the "R" sound in your mouth, your tongue should be floating in the air towards the front of your mouth, but not touching anything. The sound in Japanese is made with the same movement, but your tongue should barely touch the roof of your mouth, this should make a mix between the English "R" and "L" sound.
If you would like to see English speakers guessing English
loanwords in Japanese, click here.
This video shows Japanese people trying to guess English loanwords when they are spoken by a native English speaker. Most of these loanwords are distorted to the point that native Japanese speakers are unable to understand the correct English pronunciations. The opposite of this is also true, English words that are used in Japanese are sometimes distorted to the point of English speakers not being able to understand them.
While most languages have loanwords, Japanese is unique in it's use of a separate alphabet used to translate the words into Japanese and therefore distorting them. This also impacts Japanese speaker's ability to pronounce English words correctly, because they use a syllabic language based on consonant-vowel syllables. Thank you for reading my blog, comment below if you have any questions or just want to discuss this is further detail!
Quite an intriguing and enlightening bit of information you have so graciously bestowed upon us, your audience. Now that I think about it, I can recall various examples of loanwords taken from the Japanese language. It's amazing how we can embed other cultures into our language albeit sometimes used incorrectly. I look forward to indulging myself with more of your future thoughts.
ReplyDeleteGreat explanation of katakana! I am most impressed by the pronunciation of the R/L sound. I've had a really hard time explaining how to make this sound to people just starting out in Japanese, so I'll refer to this for future reference.
ReplyDeleteHelpful background here to explain the linguistic reasons and how these borrowed words are assimilated into the linguistic structure of Japanese.
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