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I’ve been doing the textfugu katakana lesson recently and it reminded me of something odd (I think) about Japanese.
Ok, so katakana is used for foreign words, and gets used for a lot of English words, often where there is no Japanese equivalent.
But a lot of the words are quite common and simple, which I’m quite sure there would be a Japanese equivalent, e.g. ‘up’, ‘top’, ‘champion’, ‘punch’, ‘speed’ (just some random examples).Any explanations for why this happens? Why convert an English word when there’d already be one in Japanese?
It sounds cool. That’s basically it. =)
Thanks.
I suspected (and worried) as much!Yeah the “coolness” like スタート！ vs 始めて！ I find it actually annoying like “hey i went to the trouble to learn Japanese! lol”
I’m not as advance into my studies as other people on TextFugu yet, but I’m also guessing that the popularity of western culture plays a part too. The younger generation in Japan are more likely to have been exposed to the English language and elements of western culture compared to the older generation.
Thanks all.
I should have known young people would be responsible for this. Damn young people.
The Japanese Language is very friendly to loan words, so if you examine the lexicon of the language a very high percentage of it are loan words, not just from English, but Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch, etc…
Right now a lot of new things come from America, so a lot of English loan words are being used.
Most loan words are nouns, so they’re really easy to fit into the existing grammar structure.
Its also something which makes Japanese a really hard language to categorise, and work out its roots, it shares similarities as far as grammar goes with Altaic languages, but its lexicon is completely different, its hard to identify when a word in Japanese has shared roots with another language showing a link or whether its just a loan word.
Whenever I say “hello” or “goodbye” or “goodnight” to anyone I’m speaking to online, I usually never say it in the plain English form :P “Goodnight” etc. sounds so boring, so I’d imagine the Japanese may feel the same about some of their own words. I tend to say “gute Nacht” and “guten Abend” a lot :D
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