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RE: 10 English Words that Are Actually Japanese

in GEMS3 years ago

Thanks for the great comment! Have some !PIZZA

I've been in Japan 20 years and speak the language, so these are pretty obvious to me too, but as you can see from the other comments, they are far from obvious to most people. Even as simple a one as karaoke. The pronunciation has shifted so much from the original Japanese that most people accept it as a completely English word.

Spelling is not really much of a clue, since English spelling is a horrible mess, so a strangely spelled word could be from the Norman conquest, or it could be from the grammarians years later who tried to Latinize so many English words that weren't even originally from Latin, or it could have been one of the words mangled by the great vowel shift. Similarly, English contains words from almost all living languages and many dead ones so even if one can correctly identify a loanword, unless they are familiar with Japanese they probably can't realize that loanword is Japanese.