How Japanese vocabulary is being destroyed by English

greg   Saturday, April 23, 2005, 07:39 GMT
Kirk, Some French Guy, Joel, JJM, Jon : of course Japanese is not 'dying' out of loanwords. The question remains : why such a pervasion ?
Michael   Saturday, April 23, 2005, 09:14 GMT
Hey, administrators - WW2's comments are inappropriate.
Calling Japanese people "Japs" is like calling coloured people "Ni....".
Kirk   Saturday, April 23, 2005, 09:23 GMT
"why such a pervasion ?"

What exactly do you mean? Why such a pervasion of English words in Japanese? As I explained before there are far more Chinese-derived words in Japanese than English-derived words so I don't really understand the alarm. And, can we please get the moderators to get rid of poster WW2's horrendous comments?
greg   Saturday, April 23, 2005, 09:28 GMT
Kirk : I'm not alarmed at all. My question is just about why such a quantity of loanwords ? The current trend may have been precedented by Chinese influence upon Japanese lexicon. But my question is about the English words.
Sander   Saturday, April 23, 2005, 09:30 GMT
Michael,Your an Idiot "Japps" isn't the same as "Niggers" black people havent humiliated (in camps)us in WW2 IDIOT!
Michael   Saturday, April 23, 2005, 09:53 GMT
Sander, first of all, it's spelt "Japs". And it's definitely offensive, that's what I wanted to point out. I don't like rude language, that's all.
Don't call me an idiot. Have you ever heard of net etiquette?
Sander   Saturday, April 23, 2005, 10:10 GMT
What's this?! l:(

Im not WW2! Nor have I said: "Michael,Your an Idiot "Japps" isn't the same as "Niggers" black people havent humiliated (in camps)us in WW2 IDIOT!" why would I do that?!

The person who your looking for has been screwing this forum for a few days ,ask Mjd, but he's mostly after Andre from South Africa and me.
Best you can do is ignore him.asshole.
David   Saturday, April 23, 2005, 16:44 GMT
It's true that many languages have borrowed from English, but Japanese is a special case. European languages like German and French also use English words, but probably not even one percent of the German/French vocabulary is English. In Japanese, the percentage is about 10%, which is amazingly high. The highest percentage worldwide, that's a fact.
Even though English is everywhere in Japan, English proficiency is quite low compared to other countries like Germany and especially Scandinavia.
Many Japanese English learners are focusing to much on listening comprehension and reading. Most of them are trying to get a high TOEIC score... TOEIC is very popular in Japan, there are thousands of books about TOEIC test preparation.
Most Japanese have lots of difficulties pronouncing English words. This may be due to the Katakanization of English loanwords...
Kazuo   Sunday, April 24, 2005, 02:18 GMT
Even for traditional Japanese sports, like kyuudou, I've seen English expressions ("Archery") being used. Maybe in a few decades, we'll be calling ryokucha "green tea" and shodou "calligraphy"... :-(
Lazar   Sunday, April 24, 2005, 02:30 GMT
Just as a question of linguistics, it's funny how "Jap" is offensive but "Brit" isn't.
Travis   Sunday, April 24, 2005, 02:33 GMT
Well, the term "Brit" is often used in a sort of derisive manner, mind you, but it's not nearly as strong a term as, say, "Jap", yes.
Deborah   Sunday, April 24, 2005, 04:34 GMT
"Jap" became a derogatory term during World War II. In the WW2 American propaganda film series "Why We Fight", the Japanese are shown as racial stereotypes, almost subhuman, and are always referred to as "the Japs". It is association with this sentiment that makes the word "Jap" offensive.
Jim   Monday, April 25, 2005, 05:27 GMT
I agree with Kirk. Taking words from other languages doesn't spell the death of a language.

As has been mentioned already, many of those words are terms for Western things. For example, Japanese traditionally use chopsticks (which they still call "hashi") so is it any wonder that the words for knife, spoon and fork are "naifu", "supuun" and "fooku"? Similarly, curtains, cocktails, beds, violins, malls, soccer, etc. are just not Japanese things. The Japanese word "coppu" (meaning "cup" but derived not from English but Dutch) is distinct in meaning from the traditional word "chawan".

"The current percentage of English words in the Japanese language is about 10%." Is it? Where does this figure sprout from? Were this true then wouldn't you expect to here about one English word in every ten in spoken Japanese? Trust me: you don't.

Though in commercials, yes, the percentage of English words can be high but more often than not it's whole English sentences. I don't know, I guess they think it cool somehow. However I've never heard "getto suru".

"On many products, there are short English texts ... but no Japanese translations." Actually it's usually a translation from Japanese into broken English. It's just for show. I don't think that people really care about what's written.

Even for the traditional American sport, baseball, I've heard the Japanese expression, "yakyu" being used. Maybe in a few decades, they'll be calling malt liquor "happoshu" ... ;-)