Odd Loan Words

interesting word. any double meanings to that?

je ne suis pas d accord cmhiv. on dit plutot: "on se gare dans un parking" .
Il y a eu une loi voté en france pour l'utilisation de la langue française. La loi toubon. Si on utilise un mot anglais on a une amende. Mais cette loi etait seulement marrante et a tres vite été abandonnée. Par contre il est rare d entendre le mot "hamburger", on prefere "sandwich". Les seules en france qui vendent des hamburgers sont les "mac-do" les "quick" et autres "burger king", et chacun a son appelation particuliere ex: big-mac..etc

French Guy,
I dont understand a word of your post, bust I must admit it sounds really nice to read !

Japanese is a language that has taken a lot from English.

personal computer ==>> paasokon

cocktail ==>> kakuteeru
I'm using the letter "r" but the Japanese "ru" is somewhere between "ru" and "lu".

virus ==>> uirusu
I think that this is the oddest, it seems to be from English but is so far from the English pronunciation that you wouldn't recoginise it, at first I thought they were saying "Willis" as in "Bruce Willis".

animation ==>> animee

whisk(e)y ==>> uisukii

soccer ==>> sakaa
Like "kakuteeru", this is an example of how they change what would be an "o" in English into an "a". They seem to have some fasination about all things American, so base their transliterations on the American dialect. What's wrong with that? There's a perfectly good "o" in Japanese so what's the sence of using a system of transliteration which maps too many different things onto the same thing, e.g. "cut" and "cat" both become "katto" so why not transliterate "cot" to something different, i.e. "kotto"?

white ==>> howaito
More of the same nonsence. The "ho" is useless. It is only an attempt to reflect the pronunciation /hwait/ which is only used by the older generation in some parts of America, as far as I know. "Waito" would be closer to the pronunciation of the majority of English speakers.

tomato ==>> tomato
This one is interesting too, it seems to be a word they adopted before the trend towards favouring American English, otherwise it would have been "tomeeto". Either it's from British English or another European language.

I just said that the right sentence is :"on se gare dans un parking" and not in a "stationnement". i never heard"je me gare dans un stationnement", stationnement is much more a situation than a place. And also that there was a law here in france for the promotion of the french language. So if you use an english word you were penalized. But it s an old law: Toubon's law. This funny law has been abandoned. To talk about the word "hamburger", i explain to you that there's no hamburger here, only sandwiches.:) The only one who sell hamburger is specialy "mac-donald", or else "quick" and "king burger" . and each one have a term to designate his hamburger: big-mac for exemple.

French guy, if you will kindly refer back to my post with those sentences, you will find that I used the word "stationnement" under the Canada sentence. I never said that it was used in France.

France:
On se gare dans un parking.

Canada:
On se parque dans un stationnement.

Total French:
On se gare dans un stationnement.

Total English:
One parks in a car park.

and why not :
on stationne dans un stationnement ?
;-)

Jim, i think tomato is italian.
Lommers, there's a lot of hidden meaning in "hambougeois". First it sounds and it means hamburger, "bourgeois" is a noum to describe upper-class people, we can also think of the town Hambourg and its inhabitants. I may try to use it in everyday life since now...

smeg!!

ok excuse me cmhiv

pablo, on stationne dans un stationnement ca fait un peu:"on sonne la sonnette", c'est redondant. Toubon a tant bien que mal essayé de nous faire dire des mots comme:" tirer un coup de pied arreté" pour "tirer un penalty" ou encore "coin de terrain" pour "corner". J'ai encore jamais vu un reporter sportif utiliser ces mots au "football"(encore un mot anglais).

it was a joke ! Et ne parle pas français, y'en a qui vont le prendre mal ;-)

Jim

Why did the Japanese borrow the English word for 'white'? What were they lacking beforehand?

The word "tomato" came to English from Nahuatl, a native American language, via Spanish. See http://spanish.about.com/library/weekly/aa071700a.htm or http://www.teachervision.com/lesson-plans/lesson-6828.html

There is a Japanese word for "white", it's "shiro" but they're adpoted the English word for specific senses, e.g.

white sauce ==>> howaito soosu

It was probably a marketing ploy. Another couple of interesting adoptions are:

trumps ==>> torampu (for Anglo-French cards, e.i. Ace to King of Hearts, Clubs, etc. and the Joker)
television ==>> terebi (again the "re" is half way to being "le")